Charles Coghlan seems to have been consistently unlucky. Yet he was a good actor and a brilliant man. I always enjoyed his companionship; found him a pleasant, natural fellow, absorbed in his work, and not at all the "dangerous" man that some people represented him.
Within less than a month from the date of the production of "Brothers," "[New Men and Old Acres]" was put into the Court bill. It was not a new play, but the public at once began to crowd to see it, and I have heard that it brought Mr. Hare £30,000. My part, Lilian Vavasour, had been played in the original production by [Mrs. Kendal], but it had been written for me by [Tom Taylor] when I was at the Haymarket, and it suited me very well. The revival was well acted all round. [Charles Kelly] was splendid as Mr. Brown, and Mr. Hare played a small part perfectly.
[H.B. Conway], a young actor whose good looks were talked of everywhere, was also in the cast. He was a descendant of [Lord Byron]'s, and had a look of the handsomest portraits of the poet. With his bright hair curling tightly all over his well-shaped head, his beautiful figure, and charming presence, Conway created a sensation in the 'eighties almost equal to that made by the more famous beauty, [Lillie Langtry].
As an actor he belonged to the [Terriss] type, but he was not nearly as good as Terriss. Of his extraordinary failure in the Lyceum "[Faust]" I shall say something when I come to the Lyceum productions.
After "New Men and Old Acres," Mr. Hare tried a posthumous play by Lord Lytton—"The [House of Darnley]." It was not a good play, and I was not good in it, although the pleasant adulation of some of my friends has made me out so. The play met with some success, and during its run Mr. Hare commissioned [Wills] to write "[Olivia]."
I had known Wills before this through the [Forbes-Robertsons]. He was at one time engaged to one of the girls, but it was a good thing it ended in smoke. With all his charm, Wills was not cut out for a husband. He was Irish all over—the strangest mixture of the aristocrat and the sloven. He could eat a large raw onion every night like any peasant, yet his ideas were magnificent and instinct with refinement.
A true Bohemian in money matters, he made a great deal out of his plays—and never had a farthing to bless himself with!
In the theater he was charming—from an actor's point of view. He interfered very little with the stage management, and did not care to sit in the stalls and criticise. But he would come quietly to me and tell me things which were most illuminating, and he paid me the compliment of weeping at the wing while I rehearsed "Olivia."
I was generally weeping, too, for Olivia, more than any part, touched me to the heart. I cried too much in it, just as I cried too much later on in the Nunnery scene in "Hamlet," and in the last act of "[Charles I.]" My real tears on the stage have astonished some people, and have been the envy of others, but they have often been a hindrance to me. I have had to work to restrain them.
Oddly enough, although "Olivia" was such a great success at the Court, it has never made much money since. The play could pack a tiny theater; it could never appeal in a big way to the masses. In itself it had a sure message—the love story of an injured woman is one of the cards in the stage pack which it is always safe to play—but against this there was a bad last act, one of the worst I have ever acted in. It was always being tinkered with, but patching and alteration only seems to weaken it.