Irving, Sir Henry

Irving, Sir Henry [ John Henry Brodribb Irving] (1838–1905), English actor-manager, knighted in 1895, the first actor to be so honoured. Of Cornish extraction but born in Somerset, he went to London at the age of 10 and while at school had elocution lessons to help overcome a stutter. In 1856 he played Romeo in an amateur production at the Soho Theatre and, encouraged by his success, accepted an invitation to join the stock company at the new Royal Lyceum Theatre in Sunderland, where he made his first professional appearance on 29 Sept. In 1857 he was in Edinburgh and in the autumn of 1859 returned to London, where he played four small parts including Osric in Hamlet. Feeling that he still had a lot to learn, he returned to the provinces and was not seen in London again until in 1866 he appeared successfully as Doricourt in Mrs Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem and Rawdon Scudamore in Boucicault's Hunted Down. In 1867 he played for the first time with Ellen Terry in Garrick's Katharine and Petruchio, a one-act version of The Taming of the Shrew. He was then seen in H. J. Byron's Uncle Dick's Darling (1869) and had a personal success as Digby Grant in Albery's Two Roses (1870), and in 1871 appeared for the first time at the Lyceum Theatre, under the management of the American impresario H. L. Bateman. This theatre had long been considered unlucky, and Irving's Jingle, in Albery's adaptation of Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, did nothing to restore its fortunes. Bateman, almost in despair, agreed to let Irving appear in The Bells, a study in terror adapted by Leopold Lewis from Erckmann-Chatrian's Le Juif polonais. The theatre was almost empty on the first night; but by next morning Irving was famous and he was to dominate the London stage during the last 30 years of Queen Victoria's reign. The Bells was followed by Wills's Charles I (1872) and Eugene Aram (1873). In the same year he was seen in Bulwer-Lytton's Richelieu. In all these productions he successfully pitted his own conception of acting against that of the current school of Macready. In 1874 he appeared as Hamlet, presenting him as a gentle prince who fails to act not from weakness of will but from excess of tenderness, and it was with the revival of this play that he inaugurated his own management at the Lyceum on 30 Dec. 1878.

Irving was a good manager and employed only the best players, painters, and musicians of his day, but he was never free from critical attack. At the height of his renown there were still people who found his mannerisms unsympathetic, even faintly ludicrous, yet were drawn to see him because his acting was overwhelming in its intensity. Once under his spell, they found his peculiar pronunciation, crabbed elocution, halting gait, and the queer intonations of his never very powerful or melodious voice part of the true expression of a strange, exciting, and dominating personality. Occasionally he chose to depict tenderness, as when he played Dr Primrose in Wills's dramatization of Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield as Olivia in 1885, but in his finest and most powerful parts, Charles I, Richelieu, Wolsey in Henry VIII, which he first played in 1892, and Tennyson's Becket in 1893, he was able to give free rein to his individual genius. Although his tenancy of the Lyceum is mainly remembered for his productions of Shakespeare, from The Merchant of Venice in 1879 to Cymbeline in 1896, he included in his repertory revivals from his earlier days and also a number of new plays, usually written for him and now forgotten. Some of these, together with revivals of The Bells and Charles I, were seen during his tours of America and Canada, which he visited eight times from 1883 to 1903, returning in 1904 to make his last appearance in New York in Boucicault's Louis XI. His last years were unhappy. His health was failing and he was beset by financial difficulties, exacerbated by a disastrous fire in 1898 which destroyed the costumes and settings for 44 plays. He gave up the Lyceum a year later after appearing there in Peter the Great by his son Laurence Irving. Under another management he returned in 1901 as Coriolanus, and made his final appearance there in 1902 as Shylock. His last appearance in London, on 10 June 1905, was as Tennyson's Becket. He then set out on a farewell tour which ended with his death in Bradford on 13 Oct. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. The two sons of his unhappy marriage in 1869, which ended in separation after only two years, were both on the stage.