Henry Irving

Henry Irving

Henry Irving

Sir Henry Irving (born February 6, 1838 in Keinton Mandeville , Somerset , † October 13, 1905 in Bradford ; actually John Henry Brodribb ) was a British theater actor. He was the most important theater maker and Shakespeare actor of the Victorian era.

Life

Irving grew up with relatives and came to live with his parents in London in 1848. He attended a private school and worked for an overseas merchant. He made his stage debut at the age of 18 at the Lyceum Theater in Sunderland . An inheritance made it possible for him to buy stage equipment. For about ten years he played with traveling troops in the provinces. After seasons in London , Edinburgh , Liverpool , Dublin and Manchester , he settled in London in 1866. In 1871 he celebrated a triumphant success when he played an unconfirmed murderer who is haunted by his conscience in the melodrama The Bells by Leopold Lewis. He played this star role again and again until his death. In the plays of the playwright William Gorman Wills , he often played the male lead; B. in Charles I. 1872. From 1871 he was engaged at the Lyceum Theater in London, which he directed from 1878 to 1902. The most important member of his ensemble there was Ellen Terry . With her he embodied Hamlet and Ophelia in Hamlet and Porzia and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice . In 1883 he celebrated great success in a guest appearance in the USA.

Sir Henry was also the first actor to be ennobled by the Queen (1895). He was a member of the famous Garrick Club and was friends with the writer Bram Stoker , who was also his theater agent. Stoker approached Irving with the request to take on the role of his fictional character Dracula on stage, but Irving refused, arguing that the material was too trivial for his stage, whereupon Stoker refrained from adapting his own work for the theater .

On July 15, 1869, he married Florence O'Callaghan, with whom he had two sons, Harry Brodribb Irving (1870-1919) and Laurence Sydney Brodribb Irving (1871-1914). Laurence Irving became an actor and playwright; he was killed in 1914 in the sinking of the Canadian ocean liner Empress of Ireland in the Canadian Saint Lawrence River .

Irving's performances were successful not least because of their lavish set and sumptuous costumes, but on the other hand, because of the costs involved, hardly any profits were possible. He was the artistic foster father of Edward Gordon Craig , who grew up in Irving's relationship with Ellen Terry. He found no access to playwrights of his time such as George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen . Towards the end of the century, setbacks and failures increased. When he fell seriously ill in 1898 and the tours without him were unsuccessful, Irving had to give up the Lyceum Theater in 1902. He died impoverished.

Henry Irving was after his death in Golders Green Crematorium in London cremated , his urn in Westminster Abbey buried.

Works

Irving published a stage edition of Shakespeare with Frank A. Marshall ( The Works of William Shakespeare , called The Henry Irving Shakespeare , 11 volumes, 1887 fg.).

literature

• Jeffery Richards: Sir Henry Irving: An Actor and his World . - London: Hambledon & London, 2005. - ISBN 1-85285-345-X
• Wolfgang Beck: Irving, Sir Henry . In: Manfred Brauneck, Wolfgang Beck (ed.): Theater Lexikon 2. Actors and directors, stage managers, dramaturges and stage designers . Rowohlt's encyclopedia published by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. Reinbek near Hamburg, August 2007, ISBN 978 3 499 55650 0 , pp. 140 f.

Web links

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