Pritchard, Hannah

Pritchard, Hannah [née Vaughan] (1711–68), English actress, wife of the actor William Pritchard (1707–63). She already had some experience of acting when in 1733 she made her first appearance at Drury Lane, where she remained for some years, spending the summer seasons from 1741 to 1747 at the Jacobs Wells Theatre in Bristol, and being from 1743 to 1747 under Rich at Covent Garden. She quickly achieved an enviable reputation in light comedy, being seen as Lady Brumpton in Steele's The Funeral and Lady Townly in Colley Cibber's The Provok'd Husband. She was much admired as Rosalind in As You Like It and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, and played Nerissa to the Portia of Kitty Clive in Macklin's epoch-making production of The Merchant of Venice in 1741. In 1748 Garrick, to whose Chamont in Otway's The Orphan she had played Monimia in 1742, invited her to join his new company at Drury Lane, and she remained one of his leading ladies for 21 years, retiring only a few months before her death. Under him she continued her outstanding career in comedy, one of her creations being Mrs Oakly in the elder Colman's The Jealous Wife (1761); but she widened her range to include tragedy, giving more prominence than usual to Gertrude in Hamlet and Queen Katharine in Henry VIII. She was also the first and only interpreter of the heroine in Dr Johnson's Irene (1749); but the part in which she excelled all her contemporaries was Lady Macbeth, which she first played with Garrick in 1748, and in spite of the increasing obesity which troubled her later years chose for her farewell to the stage in 1768, after which Garrick never played Macbeth again.

Mrs Pritchard's two brothers, Henry (1713–79) and William (1715–63) Vaughan, were both on the stage, playing mainly low comedy, and her daughter Hannah (1739–81), who married an actor and became a member of Garrick's company in 1756, making her début as Juliet to her mother's Lady Capulet. She retired on the death of her husband in 1768.