Early Life and Career
Alice Ellen Terry (she reversed her given names by the time of her first marriage) was born in Coventry, England, the third surviving child born into a theatrical family. Her parents, Benjamin (1818–96), of Irish descent, and Sarah (née Ballard, 1819–92), of Scottish ancestry, were comic actors in a touring company based in Portsmouth, (where Sarah's father was a Wesleyan minister) and had eleven children. At least five of them became actors: Kate, Ellen, Marion, Florence and Fred. Two other children, George and Charles, were connected with theatre management. Terry's sister Kate was a very successful actress until her marriage and retirement from the stage in 1867. Marion, over a long career, played leading roles in over 125 plays.
Terry's first appearance on stage came at the age of eight, when she appeared opposite Charles Kean as Mamillius in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale at London's Princess's Theatre in 1856. She also played the roles of Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1856), Prince Arthur in King John (1858) and Fleance in Macbeth (1859), continuing at the Princess's Theatre until the Keans' retirement in 1859. While the theatre was closed in the summers, Terry's father presented drawing-room entertainments at the Royal Colosseum, Regent's Park, London, and then on tour. In 1859, she appeared in the comedy Nine Points of the Law, by Tom Taylor, at the Olympic Theatre. For the next two years, Terry and her sister Kate toured in sketches and plays, accompanied by their parents and a musician.
Between 1861 and 1862, Terry was engaged by the Royalty Theatre in London, managed by Madame Albina de Rhona, where she acted with W. H. Kendal, Charles Wyndham and other famous actors. In 1862, she joined her sister Kate in J. H. Chute's stock company at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, where she played a wide variety of parts, including burlesque roles requiring singing and dancing, as well as roles in Much Ado about Nothing, Othello and The Merchant of Venice. In 1863, Chute opened the Theatre Royal, Bath, where Terry, now aged 15, appeared at the opening as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream and then returned to London to join J. B. Buckstone's company at the Haymarket Theatre in Shakespearean roles as well as Sheridan and modern comedies.
Read more about this topic: Ellen Terry
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)