Evelyn Millard

Evelyn Mary Millard (18 September 1869 – 9 March 1941) was an English Shakespearean actress, actor-manager and "stage beauty" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perhaps best known for creating the role of Cecily Cardew in the 1895 premiere of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.

[1] She made her first stage appearance in 1891 in a "walk-on" role in Henry Arthur Jones' play The Dancing Girl at the Haymarket Theatre in London.

She trained as an actress under Sarah Thorne at her School of Acting based at the Theatre Royal in Margate, where she learnt "voice production, gesture and mime, dialects and accents, make-up, the portrayal of characters, the value of pace and the value of pauses".

[3] For the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman, she played Lady Ursula in The Adventure of Lady Ursula at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1898,[4] the title role in Jerome K. Jerome's Miss Hobbs, both of which ran for over 200 performances, and Cho-Cho-San in the London premiere of David Belasco's play Madame Butterfly, which opened on 28 April 1900 at the Duke of York's Theatre and which ran for sixty-eight performances.

Millard formed her own theatrical company as actor-manager in 1908, and played Olivia in Twelfth Night in 1912 at the Savoy Theatre in London, directed by Harley Granville Barker.