Constance Benson

Gertrude Constance Cockburn Benson (née Samwell; 26 February 1864 – 19 January 1946) was a British stage and film actress.

[2] She married the actor Frank Benson on 24 July 1886, and they had two children, Eric William (1887–1916), killed at the battle of the Somme,[3] and Brynhild Lucy (1888–1974).

[4][5][6] When Benson played Cleopatra in 1898, reviewers were astonished by her "terrible rage", one commenting that she treated a struck-down messenger so violently that only the intervention of Charmian had saved his life.

Still in 1911 she also appeared in leading roles in four silent films, all adaptations of William Shakespeare plays: Richard III, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and The Taming of the Shrew.

[10] In the 1920s, Benson became a writer, and her published books are her autobiography Mainly Players (1926); two novels, The Chimera (1928), about "an ice-cold, egotistical, twenty-eight-year-old artist", with a frustrated wife, and Cuckoo Oats (1929).