George Alexander (actor)
After acting on stage as an amateur he turned professional in 1879 and, over the next eleven years, he gained experience with leading producers and actor-managers, including Tom Robertson, Henry Irving and Madge and W. H. Kendal.
Alexander followed Robertson and the Kendals in preferring a naturalistic style of writing and acting to the extravagantly theatrical manner favoured by some earlier actor-managers.
Alexander was born in Reading, Berkshire, the eldest son of William Murray Samson (c. 1827–1892), a Scottish commercial traveller, and his first wife, Mary Ann Hine, née Longman.
[4] In April 1881 Alexander made his London, though not yet his West End, debut at the Standard Theatre, Shoreditch, as Freddy Butterscotch in Robert Reece's The Guv'nor, which he had already played in the provinces, winning excellent notices; in an early indication of his flair for publicity, he took advertising space in The Era to reprint the most laudatory.
[1][9] He joined the Kendals' company at the St James's, where his parts included de Riel in B. C. Stephenson's Impulse (1883) and Octave in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Ironmaster (1884).
This turned out to be a stroke of good fortune, because the play he mounted as a fill-in until he was able to act in his own productions was a farce, Dr Bill, which was immensely successful, running for seven months and making Alexander financially secure.
[14] At the end of his lease of the Avenue, Alexander obtained that of the St James's, to which he moved in November 1890, and remained there for the rest of his life.
It had already been a success in America and ran at the St James's through most of the remainder of the season, which concluded with a costume drama, Moliere, by Walter Frith, in which The Era considered that "Mr Alexander was not only good, but at certain moments great".
[18] Other features of his management noted by Wearing were his continual support of British playwrights;[n 2] his concern for his employees; and his care to avoid alienating his key clientele, the fashionable society audience.
[19] Within a year of taking over the St James's, Alexander began a mutually beneficial professional association with Oscar Wilde, whose Lady Windermere's Fan he presented in February 1892.
His most important contribution to this play was to convince the reluctant Wilde that the most effective way of revealing the key plot point – that Mrs Erlynne is Lady Windermere's mother – would be to do so by degrees rather than in one melodramatic stroke in the final act.
It was thought daring at the time, but Alexander knew his audiences and kept to what Pearson called his "safe path of correct riskiness".
The celebrated novelist Henry James had written a play, Guy Domville, about a hero who renounces the priesthood to save his family by marrying to produce an heir, but finally reverts to his religious calling.
[23] In a biographical essay published in 1922, Pearson expressed the view that Alexander would be remembered in the profession for being an ideal actor-manager, and by the public for taking the risk of introducing Wilde's plays and producing "the greatest farcical comedy in the English language".
[24] Unlike Shaw, who thought The Importance of Being Earnest "heartless ... hateful" and inferior to Wilde's other plays,[25] Alexander recognised its merits from the outset.
[15][33] In two productions during 1896 Alexander and his company moved temporarily away from drawing-room comedy and society drama, first with the Ruritanian swashbuckler, The Prisoner of Zenda,[15] which ran for 255 performances;[1] and at the end of the year a rare venture into Shakespeare, in As You Like It, with Alexander as Orlando, Julia Neilson as Rosalind and a supporting cast that included C. Aubrey Smith, Bertram Wallis, H. B. Irving, Robert Loraine and H. V.
[34] At the end of 1899 Alexander closed the theatre to have it largely reconstructed, producing what The Era called "one of the handsomest temples of the drama in London", while retaining its charm and cosiness.
[15] The young poet Stephen Phillips furnished Alexander with a verse drama, Paolo and Francesca, based on an episode in Dante's The Divine Comedy, produced at the St James's in March 1902.
[1][35] In February 1906 Alexander presented and appeared in Pinero's new drama His House in Order, which was an artistic and box-office success, running for 427 performances.
[37] And on 17 May 1911 in a royal command performance for George V, he played Alfred Evelyn in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Money in an all-star production at the Drury Lane, in which Alexander and Sir Herbert Tree were held to have carried off the honours.
[1] From 1907 to 1913, Alexander represented the South St Pancras division for the Municipal Reform Party on the London County Council and served conscientiously on several of its committees.
[42] A memorial service was held at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, in London on 22 March, attended by a large congregation, mainly comprising the theatrical profession and British society.
