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.
Read more about this topic: Ellen Terry
Famous quotes containing the words films and, films and/or years:
“Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man’s life and work go on after his “death,” whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not.... There is no such thing as death according to our view!”
—Martin Bormann (1900–1945)
“Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they’re doing and saying in films right now just shouldn’t be allowed. There’s no dignity anymore and I think that’s very important.”
—Mae West (1892–1980)
“What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)