David F. Cheshire
Portrait of Ellen Terry

Ellen Terry was undoubtedly the greatest and most flamboyant British actress of the late nineteenth century. In her long and unconventional life she played many roles – both on and off the stage – and was admired by some of the best known figures of her time. G. F. Watts and John Singer Sargent painted her, dramatists such as Shaw, J. M. Barrie and Tennyson created roles for her, Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron photographed her, Oscar Wilde wrote poems about her and Henry James and John Ruskin reviewed her performances (though not always favourably).

In this biography David F. Cheshire charts Ellen Terry's life and career from her earliest reputed appearance on the professional stage in 1854 at the age of seven, as one of the little princes in Richard III, through the years of her great stage partnership with Henry Irving, to her last major public performance at 76, as Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when the playwright and critic Herbert Farjeon found her performance "electric ... gallivanting ...”

Portrait of Ellen Terry, which features over 100 photographs, many from the Terry family archives not previously published, is a fitting tribute to a remarkable actress, once described by her rival and friend, the legendary Sarah Bernhardt, as "more a woman than all the women in the world."

Contains a complete list of parts played by Ellen Terry plus biographical notes on her relations, friends and colleagues.