George Selth Coppin (8 April 1819 – 14 March 1906) was a comic actor, a theatrical entrepreneur, a politician and a philanthropist, active in Australia.

[1] At the age of 18 Coppin had an engagement at the Woolwich theatre, and soon afterwards was playing at Richmond, where he became low comedian at a salary of twenty-five shillings a week.

[1] Coppin decided to leave England in search of other opportunities; a coin toss meant he sailed for Australia, not America, towards the end of 1842, arriving in Sydney on 10 March 1843.

At Launceston he formed a company, recruited George Herbert Rogers,[3] and in June 1845 took it to Melbourne and opened at the Queen's Theatre, recently built by John Thomas Smith.

In 1859 Coppin imported six camels from Aden as exhibits for the Cremorne Gardens menagerie and in 1860 he sold them for £300 to the Exploration Committee of the Royal Society of Victoria who used them on the Burke and Wills expedition.

In 1862 he built the Haymarket Theatre on the south side of Bourke Street, and in 1863 Mr and Mrs Charles Kean played a season there.

James Smith, a critic of his time, spoke of his success in presenting "the ponderous stolidity and impenetrable stupidity of certain types of humanity—the voice, the gait, the movements, the expression of the actor's features, were all in perfect harmony with the mental and moral idiosyncrasies of the person he represented, so that the man himself stood before you a living reality".

He joined Harwood, Stewart, Hennings and Bellair in the management of the Theatre Royal chain, and, although they lost heavily at times, Coppin's record from this point is one of increasing prosperity.

In 1869 Coppin spearheaded The Old Colonists’ Association of Victoria, which received a government grant of land in North Fitzroy for the establishment of safe, dignified, affordable housing for needy early settlers at a time when there was no social welfare system of any kind.

In April 1858 Coppin began to take an interest in public affairs — he became a councillor in the Richmond municipality, and in October 1858 was elected for the South Western Province in the Victorian Legislative Council[1][14] for a term of five years.

In 1859 he was forced by public pressure to defend the propriety of a legislator appearing on stage, arguing at the Theatre Royal, Ballarat, that the profession of actor was as respectable as any other.

When managing the Cremorne Gardens he had brought out the first balloon to ascend in Melbourne, and was responsible for the acclimatization of English thrushes and white swans.

[3] A well-received biography Coppin the Great : father of the Australian theatre, written by Alec Bagot was published by Melbourne University Press in 1965.