Henry Irving

Sir Henry Irving ( born February 6, 1838 in Keinton - Mandeville, Somerset, † October 13, 1905; actually John Henry Brodribb ) was a British theater actor.

He was the most important theater directors and Shakespearean actor of the Victorian period. His stage debut was at age 18 at the Lyceum Theatre in Sunderland. After seasons in London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Dublin and Manchester, he settled down in 1866 in London. In the plays of the dramatist William Gorman Wills, he often played the male lead role, such as in Charles I. 1872. From 1878 to 1902 he headed the Lyceum Theatre in London.

Sir Henry was also the first actor to be knighted by the Queen (1895 ). He was a member of the famous Garrick Club and a friend of the writer Bram Stoker, who was also his theatrical agent. Stoker went to Irving with the Please zoom to take on the role of his fictional character Dracula on the stage, but Irving rejected the argument that the material was too trivial for his stage, whereupon Stoker decided not to adapt his own work for the theater.

On 15 July 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 came in 1914 with the sinking of the Canadian ocean liner Empress of Ireland in Canada's St. Lawrence River killed.

Works

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