Dennis Neilson-Terry

[1] Neilson-Terry was educated at Charterhouse School and made his stage debut at Drury Lane on 12 June 1906, as a page in Much Ado About Nothing, as part of Ellen Terry's Jubilee celebrations.

[2] In his parents' company he played Armand St Just in The Scarlet Pimpernel, after which he widened his Shakespearean repertoire during a year's tour with F R Benson's company, playing Lorenzo (The Merchant of Venice, Silvius, Rosencrantz in Hamlet, Paris in Romeo and Juliet, Octavius Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra, Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Malcolm in Macbeth.

[5]Neilson-Terry's roles between then and the First World War included Louis Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma (1913), and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1914).

After the war he put on horned spectacles and a scarf, resembled Mr Harold Lloyd of the films, and acted 'silly ass' detectives who were cleverer than they looked.

"[7] Of his later stage productions, one performance stood out: that of a frightened man in a haunted room in Ned Lathom's play Fear, which, the Guardian critic wrote, "signalled unmistakably that Neilson-Terry was a developing actor with his best work still to come".

[7] Together with his wife, Neilson-Terry made successful appearances in New York and South Africa,[2] and it was after a tour of the latter that he contracted pneumonia, and died in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, at the age of 36.