Mr. Daly continued his biennial visit to London. In 1888, after the failure there of The Railroad of Love,[146] he offered London its first glimpse of Rehan’s Katherine the Shrew. The immediate result was a grand chorus of critical praise, and a remarkable exhibition of public interest. If on her first entrance “she ‘took the stage’ in a manner that astonished even the oldest playgoer,” and if, as one paper said, “Katherines had been seen before, but never such a Katherine as this,” it is true that the actress herself also “took the stage” in popular fancy. Rehan at home was something of a recluse, but now in London she allowed “society” to pay her its tribute in its own way. She was fêted, and dined, and given a public reception. Different this from her habits in New York, where reading, and walks with her dogs, made up the sum of her leisurely activity. During the 1888 tour Miss Rehan played Katherine at Stratford-on-Avon (where her portrait in that rôle was hung in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre), and in Paris, where Victorien Sardou assisted in her “great triumph.”
After another two years, in June, 1890, the company again appeared in London, and this time, in the estimation of the critics, her Rosalind—“a Rosalind who is a very woman, and never an actress!”—surpassed even her Katherine.
From now on the trips to London became more frequent and it soon became part of Mr. Daly’s programme to complete each season with a few months in the English capital. He built there his own theatre, and it was Ada Rehan who laid its corner-stone.[147] She visited Tennyson, who read to her his play The Foresters, which Daly later produced with Miss Rehan as Marian Lea.
In June, 1893, the new Daly’s Theatre was completed, and the company deserted America for more than a year to go to London to establish the success of the new house. It was dedicated by Miss Rehan’s performance of the Shrew on June 27. The Foresters, The School for Scandal and The Country Girl followed, and then in January, 1894, she acted for London her Viola, which was new to her repertoire. Again a triumph, for Twelfth Night ran for one hundred and eleven performances. And again Miss Rehan consented, as still she had never done in Now York, to indulge in the life of society.
It was when she returned this time—after spending the summer of 1894 wandering about the Continent—that Miss Rehan became, for the first time, a “star” in her own right. Miss Rehan’s loyalty to the Daly company—or at least her steadfastness in refusing to be weaned away from it—was rather remarkable. When the opportunity was offered her to appear as a “star” and not merely as a member, drawing a fixed salary, of Mr. Daly’s company, she at first refused. Finally she consented to a brief tour, to supplement her usual work with Mr. Daly. Again, while she was abroad she had received an offer from Possart to appear with him at his theatre in Munich, another from Blumenthal, a third from Sarah Bernhardt, and still another from a syndicate in London to manage and head a company there. In New York, one of Mr. Daly’s rival managers offered her “backing” as a “star” to the extent of $50,000. Miss Rehan refused all these offers, and remained content as leading woman of the Daly stock company. Even now the independent tour was limited to ten weeks; then she returned to New York and her usual duties.[148]
In 1897 Mr. Daly sent Miss Rehan and his company on another English tour. Beginning (on August 26) with a performance of As You Like It, at Stratford-on-Avon, on the sward of the Shakespeare Memorial (of which Miss Rehan was made one of the life governors) they proceeded to the larger provincial cities, as far as Glasgow and Edinburgh, playing The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The School for Scandal, and The Last Word. The results of the tour were all Mr. Daly could have hoped. Miss Rehan, as Katherine, in particular, swept all before her.
It was during this English visit that George Bernard Shaw, then dramatic critic of the Saturday Review, wrote that he never saw Miss Rehan act without burning to present Mr. Augustin Daly with a delightful villa in St. Helena. He thought Mr. Daly was wasting Miss Rehan’s rare talent, just as that other rare talent, Miss Terry’s, was wasted by her enmeshment at the Lyceum. “Mr. Daly was in his prime an advanced man relatively to his own time and place,” wrote Mr. Shaw. “His Irish-American Yanko-German comedies, as played by Ada Rehan and Mrs. Gilbert, John Drew, Otis Skinner and the late James Lewis, turned a page in theatrical history here, and secured him a position in London that was never questioned until it became apparent that he was throwing away Miss Rehan’s genius. When, after the complete discovery of her gifts by the London public, Mr. Daly could find no better employment for her than in a revival of Dollars and Cents, his annihilation and Miss Rehan’s rescue became the critic’s first duty.” Mr. Shaw’s predilection for the psychological, realistic modern play led to his irritation with Miss Rehan’s labors, as with Miss Terry’s, and even to some doubt as to whether she was a creative artist or a mere virtuosa. “In Shakespeare she was and is irresistible.... But how about Magda?” Yet, with unwonted complaisance, Mr. Shaw also says, “I have never complained; the drama with all its heroines levelled up to a universal Ada Rehan has seemed no such dreary prospect to me; and her voice compared to Sarah Bernhardt’s voix d’or, has been as all the sounds of the woodland to the clinking of twenty-franc pieces.” And again, “Her treatment of Shakespearean verse is delightful after the mechanical intoning of Sarah Bernhardt. She gives us beauty of tone, grace of measure, delicacy of articulation: in short, all the technical qualities of verse music, along with the rich feeling and fine intelligence without which those technical qualities would soon become monotonous. When she is at her best, the music melts in the caress of the emotion it expresses, and thus completes the conditions necessary for obtaining Shakespeare’s effects in Shakespeare’s way.”
The memorable part of Ada Rehan’s career was now about to close. Before Mr. Daly’s death in 1899 she added to her long list of impersonations Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and Lady Garnet in The Great Ruby, but none of these brought her any added fame. Augustin Daly died, in Paris, in June, 1899, and the great chapter in Rehan’s life ended. Subsequently she was the star of companies organized for her by new managers, and in 1900 she appeared in a new play, Sweet Nell of Old Drury, in which she impersonated one of her famous predecessors, Nell Gwynn.
In the spring of 1901 Miss Rehan suddenly ended her tour in this play, and sailed to Europe, there to repair her broken health by living for awhile at her bungalow on the coast of the Irish Sea. She had been more or less ailing all the season, and the loss of her mother in January, 1901, added to her troubles. In 1903–04 she acted with Otis Skinner as a “co-star” in plays from her old repertoire, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice among them. One more season she played, 1904–05, this time with Charles Richman as her chief support, and then, on May 2, 1905, she appeared on the stage for the last time, when she took part in the farewell to Modjeska at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. Rehan herself has never had such a testimonial, though she deserved one as richly as the great Polish actress. Unostentatiously she entered her profession, so she pursued it, and so she left it, slipping out of public life so quietly that many playgoers were half consciously expecting her reappearance years after she had quit the stage for good. But she can have, as long as she lives, the reward of as genuine a success as can come to any actress. And it is also not beneath notice that she accumulated a fortune. Like Lotta Crabtree, Ada Rehan took good care of her money. In 1891, when she had been in Mr. Daly’s company twelve years, she was “worth something like $300,000.” “She owns,” says a contemporary account, “a $30,000 house in New York, possesses mortgages on adjoining property, and holds almost enough stock in a New Jersey railroad to entitle her to the position of director. She is not extravagant in anything except her love for dogs.”
Of dogs, and other animal pets, she was fond. She had a monkey, which Mr. Winter, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, described as “an interesting creature of its kind”; and she had, wherever she traveled, a dog or two. “I have seen her wandering with her dog,” says Mr. Winter “on the broad, solitary waste of the breezy beach that stretches away, for many a sunlit mile, in front of her sequestered cottage on the Cumberland shore of the Irish Sea. She was never so contented, never so radiant, never so much herself, as in that beautiful retreat.... There, encompassed by associations of natural beauty and of historic and poetic renown, and surrounded by her books, pictures, relics, music, and her pets, she was happy.”