Death of Terry

The great actresses of the last generation are difficult to appraise in this one, a time of more rapid reputations and artificial fame. Theirs was a period when the glamour of the stage seemed a more tangible thing. Because the roles they played were generally those of people far more splendid than real ones, the impersonators, subtly identified with their parts, became themselves remote and dazzling creatures. They lived, one imagines now, in a labyrinth of complex and uncomfortable luxury. Their lovers were lords or poets and their love affairs were not casual encounters but tragedies as poignant and improbable as those through which they sighed and fainted on the stage. Even their indiscretions possessed grandeur and all their daring only added to their dignity. Thus with Bernhardt, Modjeska, Rejane, Duse, Rehan and thus with Ellen Terry, who, a Dame of the Grand Order of the British Empire, the last of her peers, died last week, at 80, in an old house near the tiny town of Small Hythe, England.

Ellen Terry was born, as it were, between an exit and a curtain call, while her mother and father were playing in Coventry. At eight she made her debut as Mamillius in The Winter's Tale, a performance witnessed with apparent pleasure by Queen Victoria. When Ellen Terry was twice as old she married the then famed Painter Watts. He divorced her when she had borne two children to Charles Wardell whom she later married. After that Ellen Terry went into retirement whence she was rescued by Charles Reade. From this time, her stage career grew to its zenith. Oscar Wilde reviewed her performance as Ophelia and was inspired to speak of "in finite powers of pathos . . . her imaginative and creative faculty. . . ." and of the whole as "a masterpiece of good acting."

Of all actors, Ellen Terry most admired

Henry Irving and it is on record that she detested U. S. playgoers because they seemed generally to prefer the melancholy Booth. She nonetheless toured the U. S. with great success and sometimes sent her greetings to its citizens. Portia was her greatest role; her admirers bewail the fact that she never played Rosalind for whom her sharp features, her grace and gaiety and the instinctive good taste of her acting would so well have fitted her. Her association with Irving--with whom she played from 1878 to 1902--terminated in a quarrel which was never completely explained. Soon after they parted company, Terry became a grandmother and Bernard Shaw remarked: "When her son, Gordon Craig, became a father,*she said that no one would ever write plays for a grandmother. I immediately wrote Captain Brassbound's Conversion to prove the contrary. . . ."

Sixteen years ago Ellen Terry saw a farmhouse in Kent and asked her daughter to buy it for her. Since then she had lived there, coming to London for first nights. Two years ago she broke her arm and stopped coming up to London.

Gordon Craig, long before the death of his mother, had become a famous figure in Europe--first perhaps because of his affair with Isadora Duncan, whose affections had several of the attributes of a theatrical spotlight; then and more notably as a producer of plays and because of his superlative work as a scenic artist. He was making use of his artistry in a curious way last week. Dame Terry had requested her friends to wear no mourning to express an erroneous sorrow; she had written, "there is no death. What seems so is only transition." To emphasize this peaceful belief, Gordon Craig was designing a white coffin, shaped like a cradle.

*0f a daughter, Deirdre, by Isadora Duncan.