Life and Career
Tempest was born Mary Susan Etherington in London. Her parents were Edwin Etherington (1838–1880), a stationer, and Sarah Mary Castle Etherington. Tempest was educated at Midhurst School and an Ursuline convent in Thildonck, Belgium. Later, she studied music in Paris, France and at the Royal Academy of Music in London, as a singing pupil of Manuel García, the tutor of Jenny Lind. She adopted as her stage name part of the name of Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, whom she referred to as her godmother. Tempest had a sister named Florence Etherington who married theatre manager Michael Levenston.
Tempest married Alfred Edward Izard, another student at the Academy, in 1885. That marriage ended in divorce four years later, but the couple had a son in 1888 named Norman, who would later be referred to in the press as "Norman Lennox", taking the surname of Tempest's second husband.
Read more about this topic: Marie Tempest
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
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