Knighted for his services to literature, Michael Holroyd is the author of acclaimed biographies of George Bernard Shaw, the painter Augustus John, and Lytton Strachey, as well as two memoirs. He is the president of the Royal Society of Literature and the only nonfiction writer to have been awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He lives in London with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.

List of Illustrations	p. xii
Notes on the Text and Acknowledgements	p. xvi
Rumours of a Death Foretold	p. 1

A Story in a Book	p. 5
The Terrys	p. 8
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall	p. 16
Heaven and Holland Park	p. 22
England's Michelangelo	p. 26
The Kingdom of Pattledom	p. 29
A Marriage Is Arranged and a Deed of Separation Signed	p. 35
The Kate Terry Valse	p. 47
Found Drowned	p. 52
Happiness for a Time	p. 54
All Change	p. 63
A Failure to Be Proud Of	p. 66
Men!	p. 79

What's in a Name?	p. 91
Entrances and Exits	p. 98
Their Coronation	p. 108
Our Lady of the Lyceum	p. 119
Interval: Irving on Holiday	p. 127
His Shylock	p. 129
Shakespeare's Lovers	p. 135
Children!	p. 143
Our American Cousins	p. 158
From Malvolio to Mephistopheles	p. 170
Death of a Husband, Death of a Lover	p. 179

Her Lady Macbeth	p. 193
Ted and Edy and Harry and Laurence	p. 202
All Is True	p. 220
After the Shooting	p. 227
Counter Attractions	p. 234
One More Laurel Wreath	p. 243
Mixed Fortunes	p. 247
The Irish Pretender	p. 266
Wishful Thinking	p. 276
Choices	p. 284
Confusions	p. 295
For Love or Money	p. 303

Made in Heaven	p. 321
A Sea of Troubles: Helgeland and Hungerheart	p. 333
The End of Irving	p. 354

Women!	p. 367
Brothers	p. 392

Family Affairs	p. 409
Masks and Faces	p. 435
Not Quite Alone	p. 470
The Long Game of Patience	p. 478
An Occasion	p. 493

For Friendship's Sake	p. 513
Good Night Unto You All	p. 531
White Candle, Aged Face	p. 553
An Outline of Sources	p. 575
Select Bibliography	p. 585
Index	p. 591
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

1A Story in a Book‘The past is now to me like a story in a book’, Ellen Terry wrote almost fortyyears later in 1906. It was a fairy story, her life; or perhaps one of thosemelodramas she had been playing onstage for as long as her admirers couldremember. That June marked her fiftieth year in the theatre and the eventwas celebrated with wild delight in the streets of London. Crowds filledDrury Lane from midday till six o’clock in the evening – they would havestayed longer, singing, dancing, growing hoarse from cheering, but theirrejoicings had to give way for Ellen’s evening performance at the CourtTheatre in Sloane Square. She was playing Lady Cicely Waynflete, acharacter Bernard Shaw had specially written for her, in Granville-Barker’sproduction of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion.In the public imagination Ellen Terry had become an enchantress.Floating serenely across the stage, she was seen as a symbol of pure romance,virginal, unblemished, still in need of male protection: a ‘wonderful being’,the American actress Elizabeth Robins described her, ‘with the proportionsof a goddess and the airy lightness of a child’. She ‘encompassed the age’,wrote the theatre historian Michael Booth, ‘in a way no English actress haddone, before or since’.Her beauty was not created by paint and lip-salve nor was it the illusorybeauty of theatrical make-believe. She possessed a natural radiance and‘moved through the world of the theatre’, Bram Stoker recorded, ‘likeembodied sunshine’. The artist Graham Robertson believed her to be ‘themost beautiful woman of her time’ and many people agreed with him. Withthe ‘Hair of Gold’ and ‘Crimson Lips’ celebrated in a sonnet by Oscar Wilde,and a mysterious smile which perhaps concealed no mystery, she wasrecognised as a Pre-Raphaelite ideal. Her reputation was extraordinary: notonly was she a monument to female virtue, but also said to be the highestpaidwoman in Britain. Virginia Woolf was to speculate as to whether thecourse of British history might have dramatically changed had she actuallybeen queen, while Queen Victoria, meeting her at Windsor Castle in 1893,acknowledged her to be tall, pleasing and ladylike – everything a queenshould be. Describing the scenes at Drury Lane as ‘a riot of enthusiasm, atorrent of emotion’, The Times dubbed her ‘the uncrowned Queen ofEngland’ – though by now she had begun to resemble a Queen Mother.Every Victorian gentleman who saw her at the Lyceum Theatre performingopposite the great Sir Henry Irving fell in love with her – and noVictorian wife objected. Some young men, it was said, would actuallypropose marriage to their girlfriends with the words: ‘As there’s no chance ofEllen Terry marrying me, will you?’ Others, equally dazzled, reacteddifferently. ‘I ceased to consider myself engaged to Miss King forthwith’,wrote H.G. Wells on first seeing Ellen Terry walking one summer’s day,looking like one of the ladies from Botticelli’s La Primavera. He rememberedbeing permitted to ‘punt the goddess about, show her where whitelilies were to be found and get her a wet bunch of forget-me-nots among thesedges . . .’ She seemed to have the secret of eternal youth, to live beyondgood and evil. In the opinion of Thomas Hardy, her diaphanous beautybelonged to a different order of being – a ‘sea-anemone without shadow’ ora miraculous dancing doll like Coppelia, apparently brought to life by thetoymaker’s magic, ‘in which, if you press a spring, all the works fly open’.Even in her fifties she was still a marvellous child, delicious and fascinating.Many people had expected her to marry Henry Irving – they were such aromantic couple onstage. It was rumoured that he secretly loved her – forhow could he not have done so? Yet she was not regarded as a dangerouswoman like the notorious Mrs Patrick Campbell or Edward VII’s mistressLillie Langtry. On the contrary she appeared an example of youngmotherhood as well as First Lady of the London stage. Her public image wasall the more extraordinary since it conflicted dramatically with the facts ofher life. And if those facts now seemed ‘like a story in a book’, this was partlybecause she had recently decided to write a book. She began her memoirsthat year.‘I never felt so strongly as now’, she said, ‘that language was given me toconceal rather than to reveal – I have no words at all to say what is in my heart.’When the book was published, it appeared to Virginia Woolf like ‘a bundleof loose leaves upon each of which she has dashed off a sketch . . . Some veryimportant features are left out. There was a self she did not know . . .’‘I was born on the 27th February, 1848’, she wrote. After her death, whenthese memoirs were being prepared for a new edition, her editors loyallyclaimed that ‘we have found Ellen Terry the best authority on Ellen Terry’.Yet there are potent omissions and genuine confusions in her writings whichcover little more than half her adult life and grow ragged towards the end. Asto the facts, she gives not only the wrong year for her birth but is alsouncertain where it took place.Alice Ellen Terry was born on 27 February 1847, at 44 Smithford Street,theatre lodgings above an eating house in Coventry, the city of three spires.On her birth certificate her father gave his occupation as ‘Comedian’. Herearliest memory was of being locked in a whitewashed attic of some lodgingsin Glasgow one summer evening while her parents and her elder sister Katewent off to the theatre. The Terrys were strolling players who travelled thetheatre circuits and were then touring Scotland. But going further back,Ellen wondered, ‘were we all people of the stage’? 2The TerrysHer maternal grandfather, Peter Ballard, was by profession a builder whoworked as a master sawyer in the docklands of Portsmouth, a busy seaportand garrison town threaded with insalubrious cobbled streets and dark alleyswhere, like nocturnal animals, beggars, prostitutes and thieves lay in wait.He was also a Wesleyan preacher who spoke on Sundays in the smarter areasof the town with their muddle of demure Georgian houses and medievalchurches. He disapproved of the town’s theatre, a barnlike building in theHigh Street, which had been temporarily shut down in 1836 for ‘unseemlyand improper conduct’. But his daughter Sarah was to run off at the age oftwenty-one with Ben Terry, the twenty-year-old son of an Irish innkeeperat the Fortune of War tavern in Portsmouth, a mere boy who had beenpicking up a meagre living working the drums in the theatre. In fact bothBen and Sarah kept their marriage secret from their parents. They weremarried on 1 September 1838 in the church where Charles Dickens hadbeen baptised: St Mary’s in Portsea, an area, near the docks, of taverns,shops and brothels that catered for the navy.Their future was full of risk and excitement. They were a strikingcouple: he ‘a handsome, fine-looking, brown-haired man’ in peg-toptrousers; she tall and graceful, with a mass of fair hair and exceptional largeblue eyes. Ben seems to have taken it for granted that his wife wouldbelong to the theatre and that all their children would be ‘PrecociousProdigies’ like the celebrated juvenile actress Jean Davenport. She hadplayed at Portsmouth and was to become the original of Dickens’s ‘InfantPhenomenon’ in Nicholas Nickleby, giving the theatre there a permanentplace in stage history. The stage was everything to Ben, and Sarah wasquickly caught up by his fervour and enthusiasm. As soon as they weremarried, they set off for whatever adventures might await them on theopen road.Ben had trained himself to be a competent supporting actor. As a teenagerhe hung around the stage door of the Theatre Royal where his brotherGeorge played the fiddle and got him casual work shifting scenery, paintingand repairing props, and then playing the drums. He became mesmerised bywhat he saw: the frolics, farces and burlesques, the dissolving spectacles andnautical imitations, the scenarios with songs, the ‘budgets of mirth andharmony’ and juvenile performances in which the current child geniuswould dash round and about and in and out, playing all the roles, sometimesassisted by a ‘marvellous dog’. When the professional season ended, thetheatre was used for lavish balls and assemblies, or taken over by smartthoroughbred officers of the garrison and their well-groomed ladies who,under aristocratic patronage and to the beat of rousing marches from theregimental band, would put on ostentatious amateur performances, theirplaybills beautifully printed on pink silk. From watching rehearsals ofthe comedies and melodramas, Ben Terry learnt a good deal about thetechnique of acting – how to play the well-recognised roles of Heavy Father,Low Comedian, Walking Gentleman, Singing Servant, Character, Ingenuand so on. He was particularly fascinated by the expansive actor-manager ofthe stock company there. William Shalders appeared to be everywhere,doing everything, all the time. ‘He painted the scenery, made the props, ranthe box office’, recorded the biographer Joy Melville, ‘and even wrotepirated versions of London dramas in which his wife and daughter acted theminor roles, and visiting actors the lead parts.’ He strongly influenced BenTerry, who saw him as someone on whom he might model his own career.‘My sister Kate and I had been trained almost from our birth for the stage’,Ellen wrote, ‘. . . our parents had no notion of our resting.’ Usually she wasbundled up and carried off to her mother’s dressing-room in whatever townor village they had reached. ‘Long before I spoke in a theatre, I slept in one’,she remembered.These days of travelling suited Ben’s cheerful and impulsive nature. Onhim the sun always seemed to shine, though his family remained poor. It wasa more worrying time for Sarah. Moving from place to place on carts andwagons, the children often slept on a mattress laid out on the floors of atticsand played in the small areas below. To add to their income, Sarah wouldtake on work as Wardrobe Woman or, under the name ‘Miss Yerret’ (anapproximate reversal of Terry), play the role of Walking Woman to swell acrowd or decorate a chorus whenever she was not pregnant or recoveringfrom a miscarriage. ‘She worked hard at her profession’, Ellen wrote, and shebrought up all her children to be ‘healthy, happy and wise – theatre-wise, atany rate’.Six of her nine surviving children were to have careers onstage andBenjamin, who felt he had no dramatic talent, was obliged to work hispassage to Australia and later seek employment in India so as to escapethe force-field of his family destiny. Sarah, whose mother came from arespectable Scottish family socially superior to most theatre families, saw toit that her children were kept neat, clean and tidy. She was forever sewing,holding things together. The girls, she decided, needed little generaleducation and only the boys were initially sent to school.Ellen was soon being taught to read, write and speak properly by herparents. Ben was ‘a very charming elocutionist’, Sarah ‘read Shakespearebeautifully’ and they ‘were unsparing in their corrections’. In the lateVictorian and Edwardian theatre Ellen Terry and Johnston Forbes-Robertson were said to be the only actors who ‘delivered the language ofShakespeare as if it were their natural idiom, and whose beauty of dictionmatched the beauty of the words’. In the opinion of her son, Gordon Craig,she ‘was very much a daughter of Shakespeare, and when she spoke hisprose it was as though she but repeated something she had heard at home –something said that morning’.Ellen quickly learnt how to walk, breathe and cry onstage: in short, how tobehave. She had a genius for pleasing people and even when she mixed up herlines or got caught in a trap-door, fell over onstage or laughed when she shouldhave cried, they applauded her from the stalls and galleries. She was, as onecritic called her, ‘a perfect little heap of talent’.Even so, she was not considered quite so talented as her elder sister. KateTerry began her career at the age of four, dancing a hornpipe in a sailor suit,and was later to display what Charles Dickens called ‘the very best piece ofwomanly tenderness I have ever seen onstage’.The two little girls were born at a fortunate time in the history of theBritish stage. In 1843, a year before Kate’s birth, a new Theatre Act waspassed which finally broke the monopoly held by the Theatres Royal inDrury Lane and Covent Garden. These had been the only two theatres inthe country licensed by the Master of the Revels to perform ‘legitimate’drama under letters patent granted in 1662 by Charles II – though theselicences had been gradually extended to cities of royal residence andelsewhere through special arrangements. The bawdy, licentious wit of thelate seventeenth century had reflected the amiable frivolity of Charles II’scourt, and would eventually lead to a severe reaction. In 1737, provoked byHenry Fielding’s political satires and personal allusions, Robert Walpoletook statutory powers to control dramatic performances by appointing anExaminer of Plays. On behalf of the Lord Chamberlain (who took the placeof the Master of Revels), this examiner was to license all dramatic works forperformance in public places. One consequence of this strict licensingsystem was that Restoration plays were largely replaced by rowdy entertainmentsthat did not need a licence and that made theatres places of illrepute:music halls and drinking dens at risk of being devoured by riots andfires, abominable places to which respectable people – people like Ellen’sgrandfather Peter Ballard – never went. The 1843 Act, which was to spread‘legitimate’ theatre through the country, retained the Examiner of Plays,whose job was to encourage the staging of polite drama.The Terry family belonged to a theatre that became dominated by aprocession of famous actor-managers. They produced the great Shakespeareandramas, often in sentimentalised versions and with their parts adapted tosuit the type of character-acting at which each excelled – the specialisteccentricities of John Hare, the graceful diction and classical good looks ofForbes-Robertson, the delicious light comedy performances of CharlesWyndham, Beerbohm Tree’s luxurious decadence and genius for burlesque,George Alexander’s aristocratic charm, the perfect deportment of Martin-Harvey, Gerald du Maurier’s easygoing nonchalance. All these and others,following in the steps of Sir Henry Irving, whose speciality lay in exploitingthe sinister components of romantic melodrama, were to reflect, with theirglittering knighthoods, the genteel revolution that had taken place in theBritish theatre by the time of Ellen Terry’s jubilee.Though her attempted stage debut as ‘the Spirit of the Mustard-Pot’ended in tears, Ellen was to remember her early years of travelling from onetheatre town to another as being intensely happy. Like her father she had anaturally impulsive temperament whereas Kate seemed to have inheritedher mother’s carefulness. In 1852 the actor-manager Charles Kean, hearingof the eight-year-old Kate Terry’s remarkable performance as Prince Arthurin King John, invited her to recreate the role at the Princess’s Theatre in theWest End of London. She went there with her mother and the youngerchildren, and the following year Ellen, who (aged six) had been ‘lookingafter’ her father, travelled down with him from Liverpool to join Kean’scompany.The morality of employing very young children onstage intermittentlyagitated the Victorians. There were those who, like Bernard Shaw, were toargue that ‘dressing the stage’ with enticing seven- and eight-year-olds,soliciting infants to make money for the proprietors of theatres, was anexploitation of impoverished families. How was it possible to justify thisparading of prettily dressed boys and girls, who had not even reached theirteens and had never been to school, so that adults might enjoy a repertoireof sensational entertainments? Why should theatre managers consider themselvesexempt from the regulations that protected young children frombeing exploited in factories and workshops? Their descriptions of theatres asperfect schools of deportment, where the charges’ characters were mouldedby masterpieces of English poetry, were pure commercial bluff. But theRevd Charles Dodgson claimed that listening to the words of elevatingplays – such as radically cleansed versions of Shakespeare – was an educationin itself and kept children away from truly vicious pursuits on thestreets. Besides, you had only to see these theatre children themselves tounderstand how they rejoiced in their work. ‘They like it better than anygame ever invented for them’, Dodgson wrote in a letter to The Theatre. Thispassion for acting gave children ‘a better average for straightness of spine,strength, activity, and the bright happy look that tells of health’, he argued.‘The stage child “feels its life in every limb” . . . where the Board schoolchild only feels its lessons.’While writing her memoirs, Ellen Terry often wished she had been givensome school lessons on grammar, punctuation and spelling to guide herthrough this task. They had worked her hard in Charles Kean’s Company,so hard that on leaving the stage with the other children, sometimes in themiddle of the night, her legs aching, she would creep into the green roomand fall asleep. She hated the labour that led up to her performances, thewearisome learning of lines and the endless rehearsals lasting all day,sometimes without lunch or supper. Charles Kean, ‘a short, thickset man’with ‘chubby features’, was a pedant of modest talent who liked to boast ofthe verisimilitude of his sets and properties. He enjoyed conductingrehearsals by ringing a hand-bell from the auditorium. His wife, a fineintelligent actress called Ellen Tree, ‘parrot-beaked and double-chinned,moving solemnly within the periphery of her crinoline’, would then ascendthe stage and put everything to rights. ‘I admired and loved and fearedher’, Ellen remembered. These were exhausting sessions, yet she would nothave exchanged her life with anyone. ‘My whole life was the theatre’, shewrote, ‘. . . during my three years at the Princess’s I was a very strong, happy,and healthy child.’The Princess’s Theatre was a narrow gas-lit building between a furrier’sand a tobacconist’s in Oxford Street. It had opened in 1840 and been usedfor concerts and operas until, following the new Theatres Licensing Act, afew plays began to be performed there. Charles Kean, son of the famousDrury Lane tragedian Edmund Kean (who had unsuccessfully tried todetach his son from the stage by sending him to Eton), took over the theatrein 1850 and gave his management there a reputation for extravagantproductions of Shakespeare played against ‘authentic scenery’. These wereinterspersed with rather tepid translations of French comedies and someswashbuckling historical dramas.At the Princess’s, Ellen learnt how to ‘walk the plank’, dance a minuet,draw her breath in through her nose and begin to laugh, how to produce hervowels correctly, tuck in her chin and puff out her chest when making anentrance, and also how to manoeuvre gracefully (not jumping like akangaroo) while wearing a trailing flannel dress. It was ‘heavy work fora child, but I delighted in it’.She delighted especially in what she called ‘the actual doing of my part’.She played important parts, small parts, dumb parts (the best of which waswalking on carrying a basket of doves, agreeably aware of being regardedwith bitter envy by the other children, and feeling as if this dove-bearer werethe principal attraction in The Merchant of Venice). In Richard II she climbed apole to a dizzy height during a street scene; in Henry VIII she was ‘top angel’;and in a comedietta by Edmund Yates she played a tiger (‘Tiger Tom’)wearing a brilliant little pair of top boots. In another production she was ‘alittle boy cheering’, but even in these tiny roles such opportunities for actingprecocious boy-girls were exciting. In the Christmas pantomime of 1857 sheplayed the blonde-haired good fairy Goldenstar, and the frightening badfairy Dragonetta with flashing eyes and dark looks. It seemed as if she couldbe anyone and that everything was possible: changes of gender, character,appearance, species and identity. The world of the theatre was limitless.Ellen’s London debut at the age of nine was as the little prince Mamilliusin The Winter’s Tale. Increasingly aware of what she looked like, and gettingto recognise the effects she created, she was able many years later to recallwearing a red-and-silver dress and oddly baggy pink tights for Mamillius,and a row of tight sausage curls arranged with perfect regularity by hermother. For two wonderful scenes (before she ‘died’ offstage), she propelledacross the boards a splendid ‘property’ – a go-cart built like a toy depicted ona Greek vase in the British Museum. On the first night, with Queen Victoriaand Prince Albert in the theatre, when told by Leontes (Charles Kean) to ‘goplay’, she did so with such verve that she tripped over the handle of her gocartand fell on her back. But it did not matter. The Times described herperformance as ‘vivacious and precocious’ and the Revd Charles Dodgsonnoted in his diary on 16 June 1856 that he ‘especially admired the acting ofthe little Mamillius, Ellen Terry, a beautiful little creature, who played withremarkable spirit and ease’. Ellen cherished this role so jealously that shedid not miss any of the 102 nights of the run, and her understudy, ClaraDenvil, a little girl with eager eyes, never got the chance to show herself.In the autumn of 1856 Ellen was given the role of Puck in A MidsummerNight’s Dream. She played it well, romping on the stage while putting a girdlearound about the earth, full of mischief and vitality. Looking in her mirrorshe had been dismayed to see how gawky she was growing. But in the roleof Puck she could escape this dismaying image for it was ‘a part in which theimagination can run riot’. In Shakespeare’s moonlight she entered afairyland where every wish came true. ‘I grew vain’, she remembered, ‘andrather “cocky”.’Ellen’s last major role at the Princess’s Theatre was as Prince Arthur inKing John – the part in which her sister Kate had triumphed and which hadbeen responsible for bringing the Terry family to London. It was the firstreally demanding character she had played and, aged eleven, she found therehearsals miserably difficult. In a moment of exasperation, Mrs Keanslapped her face, unexpectedly getting from her the expression of morti-fication and tears she wanted when Hubert threatens to blind the littleprince who pleads for his life.Ellen was determined not to fail where her sister had succeeded. Shewould get up secretly in the night to practise her lines, experiment with hervoice and examine her gestures in the mirror. For the first time she realisedwhat perseverance and labour a successful career in the theatre woulddemand from her and ‘all vanity fell away from me’.Her Prince Arthur was judged a success. But at the end of the 1859 seasonCharles Kean gave up the Princess’s Theatre and sailed to the UnitedStates. Kate and Ellen were earning good money for their ages, but theTerry family had been growing and, without a steady income, Ben had toleave London with his daughters and once more seek his fortune on theroad.

Excerpted from A Strange Eventful History. By Michael Holroyd.

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