Sir Augustus Henry Glossop Harris (18 March 1852 – 22 June 1896) was a British actor, impresario, and dramatist, a dominant figure in the West End theatre of the 1880s and 1890s.

At the age of 27 he became the lessee of the large Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where he mounted popular melodramas and annual pantomimes on a grand and spectacular scale.

Both at Drury Lane and Covent Garden he engaged the most admired artists, including Hans Richter and Gustav Mahler as conductors, and Emma Albani, Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti, Jean and Édouard de Reszke and Victor Maurel among the singers.

His paternal grandfather, Joseph Glossop (1793–1850), was at various times manager of the Royal Coburg Theatre in London (later known as the Old Vic), La Scala, Milan, and the Teatro di San Carlo, Naples;[2] his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Feron (1797–1853), was a popular soprano, dubbed "The English Catalani";[3] his father, Augustus Glossop Harris (1825–1873), was a leading stage-manager,[4][n 1] and his mother, Maria Ann, née Bone (1825–1892), was a theatrical costumier known under the name of "Madame Auguste".

[4][11] Friends he made then included the composer Gabriel Fauré, the music publisher Louis Brandus, the opera manager Léon Carvalho, his future brother-in-law Horace Sedger, and the soprano Adelina Patti.

He made his debut as an actor in the role of Malcolm in Macbeth in September 1873 at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, in a company headed by W. H. Pennington, Geneviève Ward and Tom Swinbourne.

[1] Harris went on tour with Mapleson's company as stage-manager, together with his younger brother Charles, later best-known as Richard D'Oyly Carte's stage director.

[4] Harris followed Rignold's production with the first of his Drury Lane pantomimes, Bluebeard, written by "the Brothers Grinn" (E. L. Blanchard and T. L. Greenwood), lavishly mounted, well-reviewed and financially successful.

In his pantomimes Harris featured top-line music-hall stars – Marie Lloyd, Kate Santley and Vesta Tilley among the women performers and Herbert Campbell, Dan Leno, Arthur Roberts and Little Tich among the men.

[4] Some critics held that Harris had vulgarised the pantomime by importing music-hall turns, particularly knockabout comedians, but the theatre historian Phyllis Hartnoll writes that he "had a feeling for the old harlequinade, providing for it lavish scenery and machinery and engaging excellent clowns and acrobats".

The repertoire was Italian (Il barbiere di Siviglia, La traviata and Rigoletto), French (Les Huguenots, Faust and Carmen) and German or Austrian (Don Giovanni and Lohengrin).

[4] As well as the opera, Harris presented serious non-musical drama, including seasons by the Comédie-Française (1893), Eleonora Duse (1895), and the ducal court company of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1895).

[26] He assembled a syndicate of influential backers including Lord Charles Beresford, Earl de Grey and Henry Chaplin and took over the lease of the house in early 1888.

[27] From May to July he presented a ten-week season with Luigi Mancinelli and Alberto Randegger as conductors and 21 leading singers including Emma Albani, the de Reszkes, Hauk, Nordica, and Nellie Melba in her London debut.

[35] By 1892, when he engaged Gustav Mahler to conduct the British premiere of The Ring,[n 6] it had become the norm at Covent Garden,[35] and has remained so (with the exception of the late 1940s and 1950s, when opera in English was the general house policy).

Carte commissioned the theatre and opened it in 1891 with Arthur Sullivan's romantic opera Ivanhoe, which ran exceptionally well (161 performances); he followed it with André Messager's The Basoche, for which Harris adapted the original French dialogue into English.

[42] Having failed to commission an opera to replace it, Carte eventually sold the theatre, at a loss, to a company formed by Harris to run it as a music hall.

[51] In his late thirties Harris began participating in civic affairs, becoming a member of the London County Council in 1890, representing the Strand division.

[40] His funeral, on 27 June at Brompton Cemetery, was attended by several thousand people of all classes ("a final grand procession he would have surely enjoyed", in Wearing's words).