An American Actress at Balmoral

Extract

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 25 October 1893, a well-dressed young woman alighted at the terminal station of the Great North of Scotland Railway line to Ballater. A discerning London playgoer, seeing her in the unlikely setting of this remote Scots village, would have recognised the stranger as Elizabeth Robins, one of the three most ‘interesting’ and advanced actresses of the day. American by birth and early stage training, she had passed through London in the summer of 1888 on her way to and from a Norwegian holiday and, encouraged by Oscar Wilde, she had remained to try her luck in the English theatre. Her moment had come in April 1891 when she had triumphantly created Hedda Gabler on the British stage, and early in 1893 – a year she afterwards referred to as ‘outstanding’ – she had won a still greater triumph when she acted Hilda Wangel in her own presentation of The Master Builder. Pioneering matinées, however, could not in themselves support an independent, impecunious and expatriate actress, and Miss Robins, who was now thirty-one, had appeared in two Adelphi melodramas as well as for fashionable actor–managers. In May of this very year she had magnanimously yielded the dazzling part of Paula in Pinero's new and adult drama The Second Mrs Tanqueray to her friend Mrs Patrick Campbell and so had lost, perhaps for ever, the chance of becoming a celebrated and modish actress.