There was, in Sir Walter Scott’s day, an actor named Daniel Terry, who was a part proprietor of the Adelphi Theatre in London. He was furnished funds for that venture by Sir Walter, and according to Lockhart enjoyed a large share of Scott’s regard and confidence. An effort has sometimes been made to identify this Terry with the family that in the latter half of the nineteenth century furnished England with some of her most accomplished stage artists. But the connection was one of name only, for Benjamin Terry, the father of Ellen, was the son of an Irish builder, and eloped with the daughter of a Scottish minister.
ELLEN TERRY
Benjamin Terry and his wife, the parents of Ellen, were both actors, not reckoned among the brilliant stars of their day, but respectably talented, well-trained actors of the old school, better known in the provinces than in the metropolis. Benjamin Terry was “a handsome, fine-looking brown-haired man,” and his wife “a tall, graceful creature, with an abundance of fair hair, and with big blue eyes set in a charming face.” On the outlying “circuits,” in Edinburgh, and later in the London company of Charles Kean, they were reasonably successful in their profession; but their distinction—and a sufficient one surely—is their remarkable family of sons and daughters. “Think of it,” wrote Clement Scott; “Kate, with her lovely figure and comely features; Ellen, with her quite indescribable charm; Marion, with a something in her deeper, more tender, and more feminine than either of them; Florence, who became lovelier as a woman than as a girl; and the brothers Fred and Charles, both splendid specimens of the athletic Englishman.”[72]
It was while Benjamin Terry and his wife were playing in Coventry that, on February 27, 1848, their second daughter, Ellen Alicia, was born. Coventry is proud of the fact, and there has been a rather brisk dispute as to which house was the birthplace.[73]
From her earliest childhood, Ellen Terry knew the theatre and its people. She was not one of those who, like Mary Anderson or Modjeska, are forced to cherish ambitions in secret, for naturally and inevitably the theatre absorbed her. She and her sister Kate, four years her elder, were in their early girlhood as firmly established as popular favorites as actresses of that age can be.
Ellen Terry’s fame has exceeded that of any other of Benjamin Terry’s large family, but when she began her stage career she was naturally known as Kate Terry’s little sister. Before Ellen made her first appearance, at the age of eight, Kate had achieved marked success, for a child, in Charles Kean’s company, and until she was twenty-three, when she married and retired from the stage, she was recognized as one of England’s leading actresses. The third of the Terry sisters, Marion, and the youngest, Florence, had less distinguished but creditable careers. There has not been a better instance of the hereditary beauty and talent that occasionally concentrate in theatrical families.
Benjamin Terry and his wife became members of the company which about the middle of the century the younger Kean gathered at the Princess’s Theatre. Whatever the disappointments of Charles Kean’s career, he was earnestly devoted to his art, he greatly developed the scenic equipment of the stage of his day, and he made the Princess’s Theatre an excellent school of acting.
Benjamin Terry not only acted parts at the Princess’s, but assisted with the productions and stage management. Naturally enough, when Kean’s series of Shakespearean revivals required the appearance of children, the young Terry sisters were chosen. They had received what training their parents could give them. “It must be remembered,” Ellen Terry long afterward wrote, “that my sister and I had the advantage of exceedingly clever and conscientious parents, who spared no pains to bring out and perfect any talents that we possessed. My father was a very charming elocutionist, and my mother read Shakespeare beautifully, and they both were very fond of us and saw our faults with eyes of love, though they were unsparing in their corrections. And, indeed, they had need of all their patience; for my own part, I know I was a most troublesome, wayward pupil.” Her father was constantly calling for impromptu rehearsals of her lines—at the table, in the street or ’bus—whenever opportunity came. She remembers vividly going into a drug store, where her father stood her on a chair to say her part for the proprietor.
Trained for the stage from her earliest childhood, and destined unquestioningly for the career of an actress, her first appearance came and went so much as a matter of course that there has remained some uncertainty as to the date and part. Miss Terry herself declares for April 28, 1856, and Mamillius, in The Winter’s Tale. Much painstaking research has been applied to the question, confirming her strong impression. Yet Dutton Cook said he remembered seeing Kate and Ellen Terry as the two princes in Richard III, and wrote: “My recollection of Ellen Terry dates from her impersonation of the little Duke of York. She was a child of six, or thereabout, slim and dainty of form, with profuse flaxen curls, and delicately featured face, curiously bright and arch of expression; and she won, as I remember, her first applause when, in clear resonant tones, she delivered the lines: