Henry Irving

Sir Henry Irving (né John Henry Brodribb; 6 February 1838 – 13 October 1905) was an English actor-manager in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He established himself at the West End theatre the Lyceum. His long campaign to have theatre recognised as an art of equal importance with music and painting culminated when he was knighted in 1895, the first actor to be thus honoured.

Irving was born in the West Country of England and grew up in straitened circumstances. He was raised by his mother and her sister, who were intensely religious and disapproved of his passion for the theatre. He secured an engagement with a repertory company in Sunderland in 1856 and learned his craft in a succession of provincial theatres, and occasionally in London, over the next fourteen years. In 1870 he established himself as a West End actor with a leading role in a long-running play at the Vaudeville Theatre. The impresario H. L. Bateman, proprietor of the Lyceum, then recruited him and Irving soon made a sensational impression in The Bells which propelled him into the front rank of English actors. After Bateman died in 1875 his widow took over the company, which she handed over to Irving in 1878.