[1] Anderson acted in Nottingham around 1830 and around Newcastle upon Tyne until in 1834 he became the manager of the Leicester, Gloucester, and Cheltenham theatres.

[1] He left his job as a theatre manager to make his London debut with William Charles Macready at Covent Garden as Florizel in the 1837 Winter's Tale.

Among the pieces he produced was a play by Beaumont and Fletcher, Schiller's Fiesco, Dion Boucicault's Queen of Spades, and defined the name part in Maria Ann Lovell's Ingomar the Barbarian.

Another role he made his own was in Laurent and Fitzball's Azael, the Prodigal Son,[4] based on Auber's L'enfant prodigue.

He arrived in Australia in 1867 a few weeks after Walter Montgomery, with the result that the two actors were inevitably compared: the younger Montgomery, playing Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne as the "modern" Shakespearean follower of Charles Fechter, and Anderson the outmoded "elocutionary" school of Macready.

Returning one evening in February 1895 to home at the Bedford Hotel, Covent Garden, he was attacked and garrotted.