21Oct
Julia Margaret Cameron: Sadness (portrait of Ellen Terry) 1864.
And there was the famous Victorian actor Ellen Terry - a foresighted activist and practitioner of Women’s Rights who unhappily married the famous painter George Frederic Watts when she was just 16 - but already a Shakespearian actor. After Watts - their marriage lasted only a year - he was thirty years older than her - she lived unmarried with the revolutionary architect and designer Edward William Godwin (the man who evangelised Modernist design and Japonaserie in the UK. She returned to the stage in 1874, as the leading actress in the famous actor-manager Henry Irving’s company, with whom she toured America and Europe as well as the British regions…She had two illegitimate children from her relationship with Godwin - both son and daughter becoming important innovators in British Theatre - her daughter Edith also became a famous actor manager, and her son Edward Gordon Craig - who became an evangelist of the role of the Modernist a Theatre Director and a great stage-designer, illustrator and theatre-theorist. Craig became an important innovator in Theatre and later worked with Konstantin Stanislavsky (who invented a new ’system’ (the 'method') for training actors), and Vsevolod Meyerhold at the Moscow Arts Theatre. Ellen Terry died in 1928, and is regarded as a treasure of British Theatre - but we saw her at her youthful best in 1864 when Cameron (who had only had a camera for less than a year) made this portrait of her - probably at Farringford - Tennyson’s house (we can tell by the traces of wallpaper).
. With her woman’s intuition, Cameron called this photograph ‘Sadness’. Terry was undoubtedly beautiful - and she was to become world famous, and later managed her own theatre in London.
Ellen Terry in her sixties. She was a famous Shakespearian actor and actor/manager - world-famous - she toured Europe and America (the ‘World’ back then) - and the great puzzle in her life is why her reputation seemed not to suffer in the priggish and strict social-sexual mores of Victorian age.
Her actually lived version of Feminism and female independence was paralleled by the Suffragette movement of the Belle Epoque and the 1920s…and the legacies of her equally famous children. She was a contemporary of Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse - and in their ranks as the greatest actresses of their time.
Terry would be a real treat for drama students to portray - she was as famous as Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan, a leading Shakespearian actor and mother to two important - indeed revolutionary - dramaticians at the birth of Modernism in the 1900s.
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