Sarah Siddons
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Sarah Siddons (July 5, 1755 - June 8, 1831) was a British actor, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century.
She was born Sarah Kemble in Brecon, Brecknockshire, Wales, the eldest daughter of Roger Kemble, an actor-manager whose travelling company included most members of his family, and Sarah/Sally Ward. Her brothers, Charles Kemble, John Philip Kemble and Stephen Kemble were all actors. Her youngest sister, Ann Hatton, became a novelist.
Acting was only just becoming a respectable profession for a woman and initially her parents disapproved of her choice of profession. In 1773, she married William Siddons, another member of the company, and made her debut at Drury Lane two years later, in David Garrick's company as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Despite considerable experience in her father's and later Chamberlain and Crump's companies, and a blossoming provincial career, her London debut in the much larger theatre was a disaster and her contract was not renewed at the end of her first season.
For the next six years she worked in provincial companies (in particular York and Bath), gradually building up a reputation, and her next Drury Lane appearance, on 10 October 1782, could not have been more different. She was an immediate sensation playing the title role in Garrick's adaptation of a play by Thomas Southerne, Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage. It was the beginning of twenty years in which she was the undisputed queen of Drury Lane. Her celebrity status has been called "mythical" and "monumental," and by "the mid-1780s Siddons was established as a cultural icon."[1] She mixed with the literary and social elites of London society, and her acquaintances included Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Hester Thrale Piozzi, and William Windham.
Her family life was less fortunate; she gave birth to seven children but outlived five of them, and her marriage to William Siddons became strained and ended in an informal separation.
In 1802 she left Drury Lane and subsequently appeared from time to time on the stage of the rival establishment, Covent Garden. It was there, on 29 June 1812, that she gave perhaps the most extraordinary farewell performance in theatre history. She was playing her most famous role, Lady Macbeth, and the audience refused to allow the play to continue after the end of the sleepwalking scene. Eventually, after tumultuous applause from the pit, the curtain reopened and Siddons was discovered sitting in her own clothes and character - whereupon she made an emotional farewell speech to the audience lasting eight minutes.
Sarah Siddons died in 1831 in London and was interred there in Saint Mary's Cemetery at Paddington Green.
The American Sarah Siddons Award for dramatic achievement in theatre was named in her honor. The award is given annually in Chicago by the "Sarah Siddons Society."
The London Underground had an electric locomotive named after her, used on the Metropolitan Line, along with other locomotives, until 1961.
[edit] References
- Shaughnessy, Robert. “Siddons , Sarah (1755–1831).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2006. 16 Dec. 2006.
