Volume 56, Number 10 · June 11, 2009
The Greatest Actress of Her Age
By Stanley Wells
A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Two Remarkable Families
by Michael Holroyd
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 620 pp., $40.00
With a fitting touch of drama, even melodrama, Michael Holroyd opens his composite biography with the death by suicide, at the age of twenty-one, of one of its two most important characters. One night in 1868, after the London theaters had closed, the actress Ellen Terry's family found in her bedroom a portrait of her estranged husband, the artist G.F. Watts—known (to some) as 'England's Michelangelo'—to which she had pinned a note reading 'Found Drowned,' the title of one of Watts's paintings. Her parents instituted a search and reported Ellen's disappearance to the police. A few days later her father identified the body of a girl who had drowned in the river Thames as that of his daughter.
Review, 3289 words
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