George Coppin

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George Selth Coppin on a sketch by Samuel Thomas Gill

George Selth Coppin (born April 8, 1819 in Steyning , † March 14, 1906 in Melbourne ) was an English-Australian actor, theater entrepreneur and politician.

Life

Coppin grew up with a traveling group of actors led by his father. He learned to play the violin at an early age and from 1826 appeared with his sister in the troupe's pieces. From around 1835 he worked for various provincial theaters. In 1842 he met the nine years older actress Maria Watkins Burroughs at the Abbey Street Theater , with whom he lived until her untimely death in 1848.

Both emigrated to Sydney in the same year , where they found work for one season at Joseph Wyatt's Royal Victoria Theater . The money Coppin made that invested in a hotel was lost, and he moved to Hobart in 1845 . There he was for a short time manager of a theater and then moved with the majority of its actors to Launceston and later to Melbourne. There he opened compete with Francis Nesbitt Melbourne Co. , the Queen's Theater Royal . In 1846 he moved on to Adelaide and founded the New Queen's Theater in a converted billiard room in the Temple Tavern . In 1848 he transferred the management of the theater to John Lazar and worked as the manager of the Auction Mart Tavern , racing stable owner and breeder of race horses.

In 1850 he returned to the theater as a partner with Lazar and reopened the renovated New Queen's Theater as the Royal Victoria Theater , which remained Adelaide's premier theater until 1868. The collapse of gold mining and copper mining speculation in Victoria landed him bankrupt in late 1851, and he returned to England in 1853. He performed in London at the Haymarket Theater and engaged the actor Gustavus Brooke in Birmingham and returned to Australia with an iron theater pre-produced for him in Manchester .

In Melbourne he opened the Queen's Theater in December 1854 with Paul Pry in The Wandering Minstrel , Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer , Demosthenes Dodge in The Artful Dodger and Billy Barlow . In February 1855 Brooke then appeared in a successful performance of Othello . In the summer of 1855, he opened his prefabricated Olympic Theater , known as the Iron Pot . After John Black went bankrupt in 1856, he also took over his Theater Royal .

In September 1856 he made Brooke his business partner, and both now owned the Olympic Theater and the Theater Royal, which alternated drama and opera, Cremorne Gardens Amusement Park , Astley's Amphitheater (later Princess Theater ) and four hotels.

In 1858 Coppin went into politics. He became a city councilor in Richmond and a member of the Legislative Council , the upper house of the Parliament of Victoria . This led to the break of the partnership with Brooke, who received the Royal Hotel and the Theater Royal . Coppin took over the Olympic Theater , which he made Melbourne's first Turkish bath , and Cremorne Gardens . As an actor he could only appear for charitable purposes because of his political functions.

In 1862, Coppin built the Haymarket Theater with its Apollo Music Hall , for the opening of which he hired Joseph Jefferson , and sold the Cremorne Gardens . In 1863 he left the Legislative Council and began working again as an actor. He has performed in the gold fields of Victoria, Sydney and Dunedin, and toured Australia with Charles and Ellen Kean . He accompanied the Keans as their agent to San Francisco in 1864 and to New York in 1865.

In 1866 he returned to Australia and toured the British colonies as an actor over the next few years . In 1872 he was resumed management of the Royal Theater , but shortly thereafter it burned down uninsured. He immediately leased the land on which the theater stood and founded the Theater Royal Pty Association Ltd , which raised money to build a new theater, which was built that same year. For this he hired James Cassius Williamson and his wife Maggie Moore . From 1881 to 1882 he was the sole tenant of the theater, and he also ran a copyright agency on behalf of the Dramatic Authors' Association . In addition, he was from 1874 to 1877 and from 1883 to 1889 for East Melbourne member of the Legislative Assembly , the lower house of Victoria, and from 1889 to 1895 for Melbourne again a member of the Legislative Council .

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personal data
SURNAME Coppin, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Coppin, George Selth (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Anglo-Australian actor, theater entrepreneur and politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1819
PLACE OF BIRTH Steyning
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1906
Place of death Melbourne