William Anderson (theater manager)

William Anderson (born January 14, 1868 in Bendigo , † August 16, 1940 in Melbourne ) was an Australian theater entrepreneur.

The miner's son left school at the age of ten and worked as a bookseller and poster at the Royal Princess Theater to support his family financially . From 1889 he worked as an agent for the theater directors James and Charles MacMahon in Bendigo and showed his entrepreneurial spirit early on by opening a roller skating rink there. Around 1893 he managed various acting companies that came to Bendigo, Ballarat and Geelong, including that of Charles Holloway , of which he became manager in 1895.

In 1898, Anderson married Eugenie Duggan , a sister of Edmund Duggan , who was a leading actress in the Holloway Company. A little later he took over the management of this company, and in 1900 he founded the Famous Dramatic Organization . He has now headed two companies: one (with Bland Holt as a partner) performed at the Theater Royal in Melbourne and the Lyceum in Sydney, the other toured Australia and New Zealand.

In 1906 he opened Wonderland City , an amusement park on Tamarama Bay in Sydney that became known as Australia's Coney Island . In 1908 he built the large King's Theater in Melbourne , which opened in July, and the following year he traveled to England, where he hired Olive Wilton and Roy Redgrave for his company.

He has brought plays by Australian authors to the stages of his theaters, including The Squatter's Daughter (1907) and The Man from Outback (1909) by Edmund Duggan and Bert Bailey . He filmed the melodrama The Squatter's Daughter in 1910 with the original cast and performed it in his new Olympia Theater in Sydney. He co-wrote Temple Harrison and Roy Redgrave, respectively, on The Winning Ticket and By Wireless Telegraphy .

In 1911 he had to close Wonderland City after financial losses, and the management of the King's Theater he handed over to Bailey and Duggan. From the end of the First World War until the late 1920s, he directed the Prince of Wales Theater in Adelaide, where his daughter Mary Anderson frequently played leading roles. The attempt at a comeback at the King's Theater in 1929 was unsuccessful. Anderson spent the last years of his life in Melbourne.

swell

• Australian Dictionary of Biography - Anderson, William
• William Anderson in the Internet Movie Database (English)