Ellen Terry - Films and Last Years

Films and Last Years

In 1916, she appeared in her first film as Julia Lovelace in Her Greatest Performance and continued to act in London and on tour, also making a few more films through 1922, including The Invasion of Britain (1918), Pillars of Society (1920), Victory and Peace, Potter's Clay (1922), and The Bohemian Girl as Buda the nursemaid, with Ivor Novello and Gladys Cooper (1922). She also continued to lecture on Shakespeare throughout England and North America. She also gave scenes from Shakespeare plays in music halls under the management of Oswald Stoll. Her last fully staged role was as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet at the Lyric Theatre in 1919. In 1920 she retired from the stage and in 1922 from film, although she returned to play Susan Wildersham in Walter de la Mare's fairy play Crossings, in November 1925 at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.

In 1922, St. Andrews University conferred an honorary LLD upon Terry, and in 1925 she was made a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, only the second actress to be so honoured. In her last years, she gradually lost her eyesight and suffered from senility. Stephen Coleridge anonymously published Terry's second autobiography, The Heart of Ellen Terry in 1928.

Terry died of a cerebral haemorrhage at her home at Smallhythe Place, near Tenterden, Kent, England, at age 81. She was cremated at Golders Green, Middlesex. Her ashes rest in a silver chalice on the right side of the chancel of the actors' church, St Paul's, Covent Garden, London, where a memorial tablet was unveiled by Sir John Martin-Harvey.