Sir Henry Irving, the Actor Knight From Nowhere
The first actor ever knighted was considered too tall and skinny to ever make any success of the dramatic roles in theatre repertoire.
So, how did a twenty-two-year-old actor, heckled so viciously during a run in Dublin that he broke character and asked the audience for mercy, eventually become Sir Henry Irving?
John Henry Brodribb was born in 1839 in Somerset, England. From the time he was four until he was ten years old, he lived with relatives in Cornwall while his parents worked in Bristol. When he was reunited with them in London, he was sent to private school and started entertaining the idea of becoming an actor. He worked as a clerk until he was eighteen and then, with an inheritance of £100 from an uncle, proceeded to outfit himself with the costumes, props, and wigs he would need as a journeyman actor. He also changed his name to Henry Irving, some say due to his enthusiasm for Washington Irving’s writings, others say thanks to the preacher Edward Irving. Regardless, he started his career with his newfound stage name, Henry Irving.
Now he would have ten long years of slogging it out in the provinces, learning roles in theatres from Edinburgh, to Liverpool, to Manchester, and Dublin, many others in-between. In his lifetime, Henry Irving played hundreds of roles, defining some for a generation. But Irving‘s long career began with the…
