At the end of the four years' course, he still felt no vocation for the priesthood, and returning to England he joined the theatrical company of Crump & Chamberlain, his first appearance being as Theodosius in Nathaniel Lee's tragedy of that name at Wolverhampton on 8 January 1776.

[2] Gradually he won for himself a high reputation as a careful and finished actor, and this, combined with the greater fame of his sister, Sarah, led to an engagement at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where he made his first appearance on 30 September 1783 as Hamlet.

[2] In the following year they played Montgomerie and Matilda in Richard Cumberland's The Carmelite, and in 1785 Adorni and Camiola in Kemble's adaptation of Philip Massinger's A Maid of Honor, and Othello and Desdemona.

His tall and imposing person, noble countenance, and solemn and grave demeanour were uniquely adapted for the Roman characters in Shakespeare's plays; and, when in addition had to depict the gradual growth and development of one absorbing passion, his representation gathered a momentum and majestic force that were irresistible.

There has not been such a first appearance since yours: yet Nature, though she has been bountiful to him in figure and feature, has denied him voice; of course he could not exemplify his own direction for the players to 'speak the speech trippingly on the tongue', and now and then he was as deliberate in his delivery as if he had been reading prayers, and had waited for the response.

You have been so long without a "brother near the throne" that it will perhaps be serviceable to you to be obliged to bestir yourself in Hamlet, Macbeth, Lord Townley and Maskwell; but in Lear, Richard, Falstaff and Benedict you have nothing to fear...[4] In 1795, Kemble was engaged to perform in the stage play Vortigern and Rowena, said to have been a newly discovered work of William Shakespeare, but which in fact turned out to be a forgery by a teen named William Henry Ireland, who had enlisted Richard Brinsley Sheridan to produce it.

[5][6] His defect was in flexibility, variety, rapidity; the characteristic of his style was method, regularity, precision, elaboration even of the minutest details, founded on a thorough psychological study of the special personality he had to represent.

His elocutionary art, his fine sense of rhythm and emphasis, enabled him to excel in declamation, but physically he was incapable of giving expression to impetuous vehemence and searching pathos.

On account of the eccentricities of Sheridan, the proprietor of Drury Lane, Kemble withdrew from the management, and, although he resumed his duties at the beginning of the season 1800–1801, he at the close of 1802 finally resigned connection with it.

[12] Letitia Elizabeth Landon published a poetical tribute to Kemble in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1834, based on a portrait in costume by Thomas Lawrence.