This was an eye opening read about a world I knew nothing of before. It was interesting to find out about the history of theatre in the UK, but even more so about the social history and how the 'celebrities' of the day lived. There are more failed marriages, illegitimate children and unconventional relationships than you might expect. Lots of famous people crop up: Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, George Berenard Shaw to name a few. It covers a lot of ground, and is probably a bit too long and detailed for the casual reader, I also got a little exasperated with reading about the awful Gordon Craig and his inexplicable attractiveness to women. It is crying out for a family tree or two, though would be quite complex to draw I imagine! ( )

A biography of two great Victorian actors, and their families. I love the theatre and I think this reading experience made me sure that the theatre is not well served by reading about performance without the benefit of engaging with it. Without the magic of their creativity, almost all of the characters become dull and self-obsessed, and this is hugely strengthened by the focus on the essentially minor talents of Ellen Terry's very dislikeable son and unappealing daughter.

I’ve been reading biographies of these people since I was in college and obsessed by Victorian and Edwardian England. Ellen Terry was the most famous and revered actress of her day; Henry Irving was the actor-manager of the Lyceum Theatre, the great Victorian classical theatre. They lived unconventional, artistic lives and crossed paths with everybody of their age. Bram Stoker was the state manager. Terry had a long correspondence with George Bernard Shaw. Her son Gordon Craig was involved with Isadora Dun¬can, another of my youthful heroines. This chatty biography smoothly moves through each of their lives, stopping to tell the stories of various people involved with them and with the theater.
It also follows their children, particularly Gordon Craig, who became an influential figure in the theater as a designer. It had many reminders of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which covers the same period of theater history. Not profound, but an entertaining, gossipy read. I particularly liked the scene in which Henry Irving's first wife says to him, as they're riding home from a night he triumphed in the theater, "When are you going to give up this nonsense??" He caught the cabdriver's attention, stepped out of the cab, and walked away across the park, never to see his wife again. ( )

This is a biography of not a single person but a group of people all of whom were involved with the stage from the Victorian era and through the two World Wars. It is a vast and comprehensive book but mostly very readable. Ellen and her 2 children came across as very real and concrete characters but Henry Irvine and his sons remained much more shadowy. This book would be of particular interest to those who are currently involved in the theatre but the details of Ellen's son's numerous liaisons are the stuff of soap operas. I felt that this book could have benefited from slightly more stringent editing and I would have appreciated a family tree and/or handy list of characters to refer to. ( )