Sir Henry Irving

Actor and theatre manager, born in Keinton-Mandeville, Somerset, SW England, UK. He went on stage in 1865, appeared in Sunderland, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Liverpool, and in 1866 made his London debut at the St James's Theatre. He transferred to the Lyceum (1871), where he achieved fame overnight with his appearance in The Bells, a melodrama adapted from Erckmann Chatrian's Le Juif polonais, and gained a reputation as the greatest English actor of his time. In 1878 he began a theatrical partnership with Ellen Terry which lasted until 1902. He became the first actor to receive a knighthood (1895).

John Henry Brodribb (b. Irving was one of the most famous stage actors of all time. Irving was born at Keinton Mandeville in the county of Somerset.

After a few years schooling, he became a clerk to a firm of East India merchants in London, but he soon gave up a commercial career and started as an actor. On 29 September 1856 he made his first appearance at Sunderland as Gaston, Duke of Orleans, in Bulwer Lytton's play, Richelieu, billed as Henry Irving.

For ten years, he went through an arduous training in various stock companies in Scotland and the north of England, acting in more than five hundred parts. By degrees his talent gained recognition, and in 1866 he obtained an engagement at the St James's Theatre, London, to play Doricourt in The Belle's Stratagem.

A year later he joined the company of the newly-opened Queen's Theatre, where he acted with Charles Wyndham, J.

At last he made his first conspicuous success as Digby Grant in James Albery's Two Roses, which was produced at the Vaudeville on the 4 June 1870 and ran for 300 nights.

In 1871 he began his association with the Lyceum Theatre by an engagement under Bateman's management. The fortunes of the house were at a low ebb when the tide was turned by Irving's sudden success as Mathias in The Bells, a version of Erckmann-Chatrian's Le Juif Polonais by Leopold Lewis. With a Miss Bateman, Irving was seen in W.

In 1878, Irving entered into a partnership with the actress Ellen Terry and re-opened the Lyceum under his own management. It is this portrayal which is the origin of the practice of naming Jewish boys "Irving".

After the production of Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Cup, a revival of Othello (in which Irving played Iago to Edwin Booth's title character) and Romeo and Juliet, there began a period at the Lyceum which had a potent effect on the English stage.

Much Ado about Nothing (1882) was followed by Twelfth Night (1884), Olivian adaptation of Goldsmith's Vicar of Lakefield by W. Fine assumptions in 1892 of the characters of Wolsey in Henry VIII and of King Lear were followed in 1893 by a striking and dignified performance of Becket in Tennyson's play of the same name. During these years, too, Irving, with the whole Lyceum company, paid several visits to America, which met with conspicuous success, and were repeated in succeeding years.

The chief remaining novelties at the Lyceum (luring Irving's sole manager (the theatre passed, at the beginning of 1899, into the hands of a limited liability company) were Comyns Carr's King Arthur in 1895; Cymbeline, in which Irving played Iachimo, in 1896; Peter the Great, a play by Laurence Irving, the actor's second son, in 1898; and Conan Doyle's Waterloo (1894) (see King, Henry Irving's 'Waterloo'). The new regime at the Lyceum was signalized by the production of Sardou's Robespierre in 1899, in which Irving reappeared after a serious illness, and in 1901 by an elaborate revival of Coriolanus. Irving's only subsequent production in London was as Sardou's Dante (1903), a vast spectacular drama, staged at the Drury Lane.

He died on tour in Bradford on 13 October 1905, aged 67, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Both on and off the stage, Irving always maintained a high ideal of his profession, and in 1895 he received the honour of knighthood, the first ever accorded an actor.

Sir Henry Irving had two sons. Harry Brodribb Irving (b. His other son, Laurence Irving (b.

For further reading, see Laurence Irving's biography, Henry Irving: The Actor and His World, published in 1989.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.