Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree

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Tree, Sir Herbert Draper Beerbohm (1853–1917), English actor-manager. The half-brother of Max Beerbohm, he was working in the city office of his father, a grain merchant, when some successful appearances in amateur dramatics decided him to go on the stage. He made his professional début in 1878, appeared with Geneviève Ward as Prince Maleotti in Herman Merivale's Forget-Me-Not (1879), and was the first to play the Revd Robert Spalding in Hawtrey's The Private Secretary (1884), a part later closely associated with W. S. Penley. Early in 1887 he became manager of the Comedy Theatre, where his most successful production was W. O. Tristram's comedy The Red Lamp, with which he inaugurated his management of the Hay-market Theatre later the same year. Among his productions there were The Merry Wives of Windsor (1889), Henry Arthur Jones's The Dancing Girl (1891), in which he played the Duke of Guisebury to the Drusilla Ives of Julia Neilson, Hamlet (1892), and Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance (1893). The most successful of his productions was Trilby (1895), based by Paul Potter on George Du Maurier's novel. Trilby was played by Dorothea Baird, and Tree himself appeared as Svengali, a part which he revived many times. The success of his tenancy of the Haymarket enabled him to build Her Majesty's Theatre, which he opened with Gilbert Parker's The Seats of the Mighty (1897). There he carried on Irving's tradition of lavishly spectacular productions of Shakespeare, staging between 1888 and 1914 18 of his plays with a magnificence much to the taste of the time, and achieving at least once, in Richard II, a remarkable synthesis of style and setting. He also produced a number of new plays, among them Stephen Phillips's Herod (1900) and Ulysses (1902), and American importations such as Clyde Fitch's The Last of the Dandies (1901) and Belasco's The Darling of the Gods (1903). He was also responsible for the first production in English of Shaw's Pygmalion (1914), in which he played Higgins with Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle. The play was directed by Shaw, but in general Tree was his own director. A firm disciplinarian, and the founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (see SCHOOLS OF DRAMA), he was in essence a romantic actor, delighting in grandiose effects and in the representation of eccentric characters which allowed his imagination free play. He ran his company well, helped by his wife Maud Holt (1863–1937), an excellent actress who was an active and intelligent partner in all her husband's enterprises.

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree 1853–1917, English actor-manager, whose original name was Herbert Draper Beerbohm. He was a half brother of Max Beerbohm . His first success (1884) was as the curate in The Private Secretary, and he thereafter became prominent as a romantic actor. In 1883 he married the distinguished actress Helen Maud Holt, 1863–1937, who became his leading lady. She was a well-educated and very versatile actress, especially adept at comedy. Tree achieved his greatest distinction as a manager with his staging of Shakespeare at the Haymarket theater (1887–97) and at Her Majesty's Theatre, which he built and opened in 1897. In the manner of his day, he stressed visual elements with elaborate, imaginative, and detailed effects. He was knighted in 1909.

Bibliography: See his Thoughts and Afterthoughts (1913) and Nothing Matters (1917); biography by H. Pearson (1956, repr. 1971).