Sarah Siddons: The First Celebrity Actress

Introduction

‘A worthless candidate for fame and fortune’¹

On the night of Friday 29 December 1775, a 20-year-old actress steps onto the stage of the Drury Lane Theatre. It is her London debut. Drury Lane is one of only two theatres in the city to have a prestigious royal patent. It is packed nightly with the fashionable, political and literary elite who come here to watch the finest performances of the most popular plays. Its celebrated actor/manager, David Garrick, will retire once this season is finished, so anyone who is anyone wants to come and see his work. Over many years, the talented and energetic Garrick has built up the reputation of Drury Lane. The opportunity for the young actress to join his company and perform here is truly a golden one.

The new actress is playing the part of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. She is billed simply as ‘a Young Lady (being her first appearance)’.² She is Sarah Siddons, a married mother of two, who has been acting all her life. Her parents own a travelling company of players, and she has performed in the various plays they have put on for as long as she can remember. But appearing here at this famous venue, in the holiday season between Christmas and New Year, in front of the great and the good, the ‘splendid and numerous’ feels a totally different experience for her.³ Sarah has never been to London before, and the capital city is far larger than any other in Britain.

Just eight weeks before this evening, Sarah gave birth to her second child, a daughter, named Sarah after her mother, but always called Sally. Sarah’s pregnancy has delayed her arrival at Drury Lane. The season started in September, but she has only been able to join now, in December. Her labour started in Gloucester, while she was midway through a performance there. She has brought the new baby with her to London, along with her 14-month-old toddler son, Henry, and her husband of two years, William, whom she affectionately calls ‘Sid’. Nobody involved seems to have considered the toll this hurried birth will have taken on her, both emotionally and physically. Sarah’s ‘Sid’ is an actor too, but it is already evident that he does not have the skill to make his living as a leading professional actor. The couple have both been hired on the same terms – £5 per week (£678.60 today) – but it is understood that ‘Sid’ will be playing smaller roles. The Siddons have known of the famous Garrick throughout their working lives, but they have almost certainly never met him. Garrick sent a scout to appraise Sarah’s acting talents rather than seeing her for himself. He carried out the negotiation to contract both Sarah and William to join the Drury Lane company entirely through correspondence.

Sarah is so nervous that even her first entrance as Portia onto the Drury Lane stage appears tentative. Rather than striding confidently on, she totters, a delicate and fragile-looking figure, seemingly totally overcome by the vast audience in front of her. Many years later, she will write about the experience, admitting that:

The awful consciousness that one is the sole object of attention to that immense space, lined as it were with human intellect from top to bottom, and on all sides round, may perhaps be imagined but cannot be described, and never never to be forgotten.⁴

Her nerves overpower her.

She is not helped by her costume. Sarah is tall, dark and striking but what she is wearing – faded and salmon-coloured with an untailored back that hangs down like a sack – does nothing to accentuate her good features. There has been little time for her to sort out a costume. Often actors provide their own, but Sarah has been loaned hers by the Drury Lane wardrobe. To make things worse, it seems to the audience as if their Portia is not entirely sure either where to fix her eyes or where to plant her feet. And worst of all, no sooner does she start saying her lines than her voice dries up almost completely. As one audience member later puts it: ‘She spoke in broken, tremulous tones, and at the close of each sentence her voice sank into a horrid whisper that was almost inaudible.’⁵

The London audience packed into Drury Lane are all too aware that the press will pass their verdict the following day. The young actress before them seems overwhelmed by this. The exposure on this huge London stage is clearly too much for her. Nevertheless, she does manage to rally slightly in the final act, adequately delivering ‘The quality of mercy’ speech in the famous trial scene towards the end of the play. But she talks far too faintly, not projecting her voice to reach those seated in the back rows. Besides, the audience have already made up their minds: ‘After her first exit, the judgement of the pit was unanimous as to her beauty but declared her awkward and provincial,’ writes one.⁶ As a debut, it could hardly be worse.

The next day the newspapers’ verdict is, as expected, one of almost universal condemnation. The Morning Chronicle advises Sarah to ‘throw more fire and spirit into her performance.’⁷ The Middlesex Journal pronounces her face and figure agreeable but judges her acting ability to be nothing particularly special: ‘There is not room to expect anything beyond mediocrity.’⁸ To be mediocre is worse than anything. She is a creature of the provinces and must be sent back there to appear in mediocre theatres, acting in mediocre plays, with mediocre colleagues, far from the bright lights of the prestigious London stage. The newspapers single out her voice as a particular weakness and pick up on ‘a vulgarity in her tones’.⁹ It is a fundamental requirement for a London actress, as the darling of the great and good, to appear classless, refined, and not to reveal any traces of early vulgarity, regardless of her origins. The reviewers are clear: Sarah is ‘ill-calculated to sustain that line in a theatre she had at first been held forth in.’¹⁰ Not only does she lack the required refinement, but she has also been over-promoted. They simply do not see the promise which Garrick thinks he has spotted in her.

Only The Morning Herald is more forgiving, and that is only because the owner of the paper, the Reverend Henry Bate, has been partly responsible for recruiting Sarah. He had been sent by Garrick as a scout to see Sarah perform in the provinces. It was Bate who negotiated for Sarah to appear at Drury Lane – at what Sarah would later describe as ‘very low terms’.¹¹ So he does not want to lose face. Surely his critic can find something positive to write about her? She has a fine figure, with expressive features, enthuses the journalist in The Morning Herald, but ‘Her fears last night so prevented her doing justice to her powers.’¹² The problem, it is clear, is stage fright. If it were not for that, she may well have what it takes. But the 20-year-old is so scared by the prospect of all these people staring at her that she loses the ability to perform in front of them. She might be a powerful actress, but she is so hobbled by such crippling anxiety that all her talent goes for nothing. These reviews will rankle with Sarah for ever after.

After the main play has been performed of an evening, it is the custom to present what is called an ‘afterpiece’, using the cast in different guises from the roles they have been given earlier. The afterpiece this first night is a pageant called The Jubilee which Garrick conceived in honour of William Shakespeare. Garrick’s regular cast are not much enamoured of it as part of the repertoire, mainly because they are compelled to represent silent Shakespearean characters, and often not those characters for which they have made their names. His three other leading ladies this season – 47-year-old Mary Ann Yates, who is the most celebrated tragedienne of the time; 35-year-old Elizabeth Younge, a previous protégée of Garrick’s, who is famed for her portrayal of Shakespearean heroines; and 38-year-old Frances Abington, who specialises in comedy – do not welcome their new rival. Their instinct is that Garrick’s casting Sarah as Venus indicates favouritism. They conspire to ensure that they block Sarah’s eyeline, so she cannot be seen by the audience. Garrick, old hand that he is, immediately notices what is going on. Gallantly, he leads Sarah as Venus downstage, right past all her scheming rivals, so the audience can still see her. But he later admits to Sarah that he dares not cast her in any better roles in case the other actresses poison her.

Five nights later, on Wednesday 3 January 1776, Sarah reprises the role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. This time she seems to fare slightly better. At least the audience can now hear her reciting Shakespeare’s blank verse. The first night might linger as a shameful, miserable memory, but she has no choice but to keep on trying. Next Garrick casts her as the title role in a new abridgement of a play by Ben Jonson called Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. The title role implies that Sarah has a large part to play. In fact, the comedy revolves around a set-up where the lead character looks as if he is marrying someone silent, who is to be played by Sarah. Yet, right up to the first night, Garrick cannot make up his mind as to whether the part should be played by a woman or a man. Throughout the action Epicoene appears to be a woman, but at the end she reveals herself to be a boy. As soon as the play opens, the critics complain that this vital moment in the play simply does not work. After only three performances, Garrick replaces Sarah – with a male actor.

The next play in which Garrick casts Sarah is a new piece by none other than the Reverend Henry Bate, the newspaper owner who went to scout Sarah and was responsible for her coming to London. Perhaps Bate envisaged her playing a part in his new work when he recommended her to Garrick. The play is called The Blackamoor Wash’d White and is based on one of Aesop’s fables. It never makes it into print but is probably about the contentious slave trade. Regardless of how it deals with its subject matter, Bate’s play only runs for three nights. Then the audience can bear it no more. Mayhem ensues. Fighting breaks out in the stalls, some members of the audience attacking Bate’s writing and some defending him. When Garrick comes forward to try to restore some sort of order, he is pelted by an orange. The play is never performed again.

Sarah might have hoped that the reaction to the play itself would draw the attention of the critics away from her. But she does not get away so lightly. The Morning Chronicle is positive about how the cast overall manage this piece of tosh, but they are excoriating about poor Sarah’s performance:

All played well except Mrs Siddons, who, having no comedy in her nature, rendered that ridiculous which the author evidently intended to be pleasant.¹³

They have spotted yet another weakness. Sarah is not particularly strong when it comes to comedy, despite having suggested to Garrick during their written negotiations that comedy is one of her strengths. The Morning Chronicle describes her as being ridiculous in the role. It is a further opportunity for backbiting from her fellow actresses. And another reason for Garrick to wonder whether he has done the right thing in recruiting her.

Later the same month Garrick gives Sarah the part of Emily in Hannah Cowley’s The Runaway, another comedy, this time revolving around marriage and how women strive to overcome the injustices imposed by family life. Elizabeth Younge has been cast as Bella, the better of the female roles. The play will run for seventeen nights, but Garrick recasts Sarah after only five.

Two more comedies follow. In April Sarah plays the part of Maria in a new farce, Thomas Vaughan’s Love’s Metamorphoses, in which her performance is judged as substandard by one spectator – her future unofficial biographer James Boaden. Then, in May, she gets her first professional billing at Drury Lane. Appearing in the programme for the first time as Mrs Siddons, Sarah takes the role of Mrs Strickland in Benjamin Hoadley’s The Suspicious Husband. But the critics hardly mention her.

Sarah’s fellow actresses gossip among themselves that Garrick has hired Sarah to keep them subdued. He has a history of playing his actresses off against each other. And Sarah too believes that this is his motivation. Garrick asks Sarah to sit in his personal box and watch him on stage whenever she is not in the cast. She might have preferred to spend time with her two young children, but instead she dutifully sits watching him perform. She brands his gesture as ‘cruel, cruel treatment’ and fears it will only increase the already spiteful jealousy. ¹⁴ At other times Garrick leads Sarah out from the green room, where all the actors relax when not performing, and sits her down at his side, in another act of seeming favouritism. There are rumours that Garrick may have hired Sarah to show himself off to the audience to his best advantage. If she fumbles her way through a part, it makes him look all the better. Perhaps. But Garrick has no need to use such tactics at this point in his career.

As Garrick is due to retire at the end of the season, he wants to show off his skills as a leading actor for the final time. He decides to put on Shakespeare’s Richard III. His performance in the title role has always been a particular highlight of his repertoire. To the consternation of the other actresses in the company, he casts Sarah as Richard III’s wife, Lady Anne. Sarah cannot help but be delighted at this news. It feels like a break. Perhaps he rates her, after all? But her nerves are already shredded. She cannot relax. In rehearsal Garrick picks her up on a habit noticed by one of the critics, that her arms just hang stiffly by her sides on stage. Can she ensure she moves them with greater fluidity, he asks her? At this piece of direction, she defiantly flings her arms preposterously wide. Garrick again asks her to make the move more naturally. She tries once more. Garrick begins to grumble to himself. If she goes on like this, she will be in danger of knocking off his wig, he murmurs. Quick as a flash, Sarah replies that the great Garrick must be nervous she is going to overshadow his nose. In other words, she makes a poorly judged joke that he must be worrying that she will upstage him. Garrick merely bursts into laughter at Sarah’s obstructive attitude. She clearly cannot take direction from him. But at least she is showing some spirit.

Garrick knows that the audience will be coming to the play primarily to see him in this famous role, not the rest of the cast. He choreographs the blocking so that Sarah, as Lady Anne, has her back to the audience and delivers one of her lines to him upstage, so he is looking straight out towards the auditorium, and everyone can see his face clearly. On the first night, Sarah is so overcome with nerves that she completely forgets where she has been directed to stand. In saying her line, she obscures Garrick from the audience. At this, Garrick glares at her. So ferocious is his scowl that Sarah will never forget it. She includes the incident in the notes she makes for her official biographer, Thomas Campbell, fifty years later, so he can put the record straight. The memory still leaves its scars. For their part, the critics simply condemn Sarah as ‘lamentable’ in the role of Lady Anne.¹⁵ Garrick’s final Drury Lane season comes to an end in June 1776 with a production of Susanna Centilivre’s The Wonder. He does not cast Sarah.

For the past six months Sarah has been short of sleep, feeding her youngest child and caring for a demanding toddler. She is in a city that she does not know, in lodgings with little space for a young family. She married William for love, but he is not the most sympathetic of husbands. While he is also a member of Garrick’s company, they both know that he will never shine as an actor. Sarah may be failing in her lead roles, but William will never even get the chance to play a substantial part here in London. He has his own demons.

Sarah does have real strengths as an actress. She is beautiful. She has an arresting stage presence. She knows her stagecraft – how to interact with other actors, how to handle props – but she has not yet worked out where her strengths and weaknesses lie as a performer. True, she has been acting all her life, but never at this level. It must feel very different when the famous David Garrick gives her direction from the times her father tells her to move downstage at a certain point in the action. Sarah knows her parents will be disappointed in her. They never rated William as an actor, and now their fears about how the young family will make their living are turning out to be well founded. It would be difficult to go back them, their tails between their legs.

The two royal patent London theatres, Drury Lane and its rival Covent Garden, operate a seasonal system where they put on plays from autumn through to late spring. Outside those times, the convention is that actors are free to find work in the regional theatres, or to take a rest. There is no question of Sarah stopping work. She has four mouths to feed. The young family head to the New Street Theatre, Birmingham, for the summer. Here they await their fate. The Siddons’ contract is up, after all, and they are wholly reliant on Garrick putting in a good word for them with the incoming management who are taking over at Drury Lane. The new management consists of a triumvirate: the promising young playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan; his father-in-law, Thomas Linley; and a successful, wealthy physician, James Ford. These three have surely read Sarah’s disastrous reviews. They may have seen both Sarah and William perform. Do they discern any talent in either which will induce them to invite the pair back for the following season?

Back in February, William has already written to Garrick, tentatively suggesting a new contract of £3 per week for Sarah and £2 for himself – a halving of their combined earnings from the first season. It is an admission of their lack of bargaining power. This would be the first time that Sarah earned more than her husband, but William is simply accepting the fact that, although his wife may have struggled at Drury Lane, he is even less attractive than her to the management. Garrick does not respond. Instead, a letter for Sarah now arrives at the New Street Theatre, Birmingham. It is written by William Hopkins, the prompt at Drury Lane. It has been decided, writes Hopkins, that the services of Mr and Mrs Siddons are no longer required. Their contracts have not been renewed. Sarah and William are of so little significance that even the task of writing to them has been delegated to the prompt. Later, the couple learn that Frances Abington, one of Sarah’s rival actresses in the Drury Lane company, has told Richard Brinsley Sheridan that he is making a mistake in letting the young Sarah go. But Sheridan ignores her.

Sarah feels utterly betrayed by the departing Garrick. He has clearly not stood up for them. He has ‘rather depreciated my talents.’¹⁶ She believes that he made a promise to put in a good word for them. But instead, he has let them down ‘in the most humiliating manner’.¹⁷ She is proud. She knows the season has gone disastrously badly. But she nevertheless loathes being shamed and humiliated. Now she is finished, a washed-up young mother of two with a potentially unemployable husband, her own reputation shattered. To make matters worse, the verdict is a very public one. The reviews are there for all to read. She knows the word of mouth on her is poor, as audience members relate to their friends and relatives what they think of the new actress at Drury Lane. The critics in Birmingham agree with the verdict of their London colleagues: ‘She motions nicely, but she can’t shout out loud.’¹⁸ Her voice is just not up to it. Sarah is devastated and sinks into deep despair.

For the next year and a half, the accumulated stress leads Sarah into some kind of mental breakdown, probably a clinical depression. By her own admission she seems to be hastening to her decline. As she wrote in her notes for her biographer, over fifty years later, with the memory still raw for her:

Who can conceive the size of this cruel disappointment, this dreadful reverse of all my ambitious hopes in which too was involved the subsistence of two helpless infants!¹⁹

This is not simply about her professional reputation as an actress. The fate of her children is also at stake. She has been ‘banished from Drury Lane as a worthless candidate for fame and fortune.’²⁰ Acting is all she knows and yet even that is now being called into question. There is no welfare state to support them. The workhouse may very well beckon. And who there will give a moment’s thought to a striking young mother telling everyone she meets all about how it looked for a brief interval as if she might have made it as an actress at the famous Drury Lane?

Six and a half years later, the night of Thursday 10 October 1782 turns out to be one of the most remarkable ever to take place in the history of British theatre. Drury Lane presents a production of Thomas Southerne’s Isabella or The Fatal Marriage. The tragedy is so affecting that almost the entire audience find themselves moved to tears, while several members have hysterics at the power displayed by the actress who has been cast in the lead role of Isabella. The reviews are ecstatic. Never has a performer played the part of a tragic heroine with such intensity. She makes the story come to vivid life in a way no-one else has ever done before.

The young woman, still only 27, is described as having founded a new religion. She instantly becomes a celebrity, more immediately famous than any of her predecessors. From now on, a life beckons for her where she will never be out of the spotlight. She will be mobbed by her fans, wherever she goes. The newspapers will feature gossipy details about her private life. Aristocratic society will fall over itself to make her acquaintance. She will become the darling of the royal family. As for money, she will go on to earn more even than her predecessor, David Garrick. She will learn how to play the all-important fame game. She will ensure that she is painted by the greatest portrait artists of the day, and that engraved copies of these painted images are widely sold so that her face becomes familiar even to those who never see her perform. She will travel the length and breadth of the British Isles to appear before her adoring fans at theatres packed to the rafters. She will seek to control what the newspapers write about her, and even come on stage to argue her case to her audience direct, when her behaviour is occasionally called into question. For the whole of the rest of her life, she will be a superstar – the first celebrity actress.

The name of that triumphant young performer treading the boards of Drury Lane as Isabella that evening in 1782? Sarah Siddons.

Chapter 1

Childhood

‘Common Players of Interludes’¹

Sarah Kemble was born in a rented upstairs room at The Shoulder of Mutton Inn in Brecon on 5 July 1755. Her parents, Roger and Sarah (or Sally) Kemble, were actors in The Warwickshire Company of Comedians, a troupe of itinerant players putting on shows as they travelled from town to town. Always on the move and without a permanent home, the company of actors had come to Brecon for the May Fair and to use the town as a base for touring Wales for the following couple of months. Along with the other actors in the company, the Kembles needed somewhere to lodge and The Shoulder of Mutton took them in. The pub was frequented by farmers on market day. It was known for good ale and for its legs of mutton, roasted on a kitchen fire. Sally Kemble was left behind here in a rented room to give birth all alone, the rest of the company having travelled on to Llandrindod Wells to perform without her. Her husband Roger was presumably needed on stage. She gave her first child her own name. Sarah’s very arrival in the world felt hurried and inconvenient.

Sarah’s mother had been born Sarah, or Sally, Ward in Clonmel in Ireland. Her grandfather, John Ward, was originally from Ireland and had settled in England. John Ward was a Methodist, and also a travelling player, who had established The Warwickshire Company of Comedians in 1740, touring the West Midlands and parts of Wales, including Staffordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. He and his wife Sarah married in Leominster. She was the daughter of yet another set of theatrical players, the Butchers. So, on her mother’s side Sarah Siddons came from three generations of actors and grew up to be part of a fourth. Strikingly, both her parents and her grandparents, once they were married, took on the management of their theatrical companies.

Both Sarah’s maternal grandmother and her mother acted in The Warwickshire Company of Comedians. They played in Stratford – indeed, John Ward’s was the first recorded company to perform a Shakespeare play there. John Ward wrote the two earliest surviving prompt books for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and in later life he organised a benefit to restore Shakespeare’s statue in Stratford. John and Sarah Ward retired to Leominster, where they died in the 1770s when our Sarah was in her early twenties.

The Wards were not best pleased when their daughter Sally fell in love with a travelling actor in their company, Roger Kemble. Born a Roman Catholic in Hereford on 1 March 1721, and fourteen years older than Sally, Kemble had started his working life as a barber, but had soon begun to earn his living as an actor. His private life had been turbulent; in 1745, when he was in his early twenties, a defamation lawsuit had been taken out against him in Gloucestershire by a widow named Sarah Hawkins, presumably the result of a falling out over their relationship. Seven years later, in 1752, Roger had become romantically involved with an actress called Fanny Furnival, who was separated from her husband. Although Fanny and Roger never married, she appeared on stage as ‘Mrs Kemble’. After some kind of argument with their previous company of actors, Roger Kemble and Fanny Furnival answered an advertisement to join John Ward’s Warwickshire Company of Comedians instead. There, Roger Kemble’s relationship with Fanny Furnival came to an end and he met his future wife – the owner’s young daughter, Sally Ward. So, by the time Sarah’s parents became a couple, Roger Kemble’s name had been controversially linked to two other women, one of whom he left to become involved with the much younger Sally.

Kemble is a Herefordshire and Wiltshire surname and earlier generations of the family seem to have lost land by staying loyal to the king in the Civil War. Sarah Siddons and her siblings made much of how the family were descended from a Captain Kemble – who displayed such bravery after the Battle of Worcester that Charles II gifted him a war horse – and a Father John Kemble – who was involved in the Titus Oates plot and then sentenced to death, aged 80. Sarah even visited Father Kemble’s grave in Welsh Newton in the Wye Valley when she was an established middle-aged actress and arranged to pay a monthly stipend for its upkeep. This focus on past heroes provided a useful means of detracting from any whiff of scandal around her father’s early life.

When Roger did declare his intentions to his future in-laws, John Ward was reported to have quipped that he had not wanted his daughter to marry an actor, but since Roger Kemble could not act then his daughter had not disobeyed him. In fact, the Wards, the Kembles and the Butchers before them were unusual in that they chose to marry, rather than to live together unmarried. This yearning for respectability ran through all three generations, and into Sarah Siddons’ own as well.

Life for the touring or ‘strolling’ companies was not easy. While such troupes had existed since the Middle Ages, they had been under constant pressure since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. They were compelled by law to carry Letters Patent from the king or a licence from the lord chamberlain. In the hundred years or so before Sarah’s birth, throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the status of these troupes was continually under attack. In 1713, a law was passed that classed ‘common players of interludes’ in the same category as mountebanks (in other words, charlatans or tricksters) and performing animals.² Religious elements within the local communities saw the travelling troupes of actors as dangerously subversive and, in 1737, eight years before Sarah was born, a yet more stringent Licensing Act was made law, whereby the travelling players were prevented from acting ‘for hire, gain or reward’ in any place where they did not live.³ Additionally, no new