Madge Kendal
Her mother was from a Dutch family: her father taught languages in London, and she spoke English with no trace of a foreign accent.
[12] There, in 1854, aged five, Kendal played the role of young Marie in the drama The Struggle for Gold; or, The Orphan of the Frozen Sea by Edward Stirling, under her father's management.
[16] Nevertheless, she played a singing role in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Bath Theatre in 1863, starring the sisters Ellen and Kate Terry as Titania and Oberon, respectively.
[1][17] Seventy years later Kendal recalled the production: "Even today I remember Ellen Terry's performance of Titania as a dream of charm.
The Era wrote: In the same Haymarket season she played Blanche to Montgomery's King John, and Desdemona to the Othello of Ira Aldridge.
[20] But despite good business at the box office, Montgomery was not a top-rank star,[n 3] and the season did not mark a breakthrough in the leading lady's career.
For six consecutive nights they appeared there in Romeo and Juliet, The Lady of Lyons, The Hunchback, As You Like It, East Lynne, Uncle's Will and Weeds.
[8][32] Back in London in early 1875, they played Kate Hardcastle and Young Marlowe in She Stoops to Conquer at the Opera Comique, and went on to the Gaiety in As You Like It; the reviewer in The Athenaeum wrote, "One side of the character of Rosalind is shown by Mrs Kendal with admirable clearness and point.
So suited to her style are the bantering speeches Shakespeare has put into the mouth of Rosalind, they might almost have been written for her", although the same critic missed "the underlying tenderness that more emotional artists are able to present.
[34] She went on to play Mrs Fitzroy in Hamilton Aide's A Nine Days' Wonder, and then Lady Hilda in Gilbert's fairy comedy, Broken Hearts.
She played Susan Hartley (a part she reprised in several later revivals) in Palgrave Simpson's adaptation of a French comedy, called A Scrap of Paper.
[8][32] Since its inception in 1835 the St James's, in an unfashionable part of the West End, had acquired a reputation as an unlucky theatre, and more money had been lost than made by successive managements.
[41] This was followed in December by Tennyson's The Falcon, based on the Decameron, in which the Kendals made considerable successes as Lady Giovanna and the Count.
[1][32] Wearing regards The Money Spinner (1881) as of particular importance to this period of the theatre's history, being the first of several of A. W. Pinero's plays staged there by Hare and the Kendals.
[1] Among the company in these years the actresses included Fanny Brough, Helen Maud Holt and the young May Whitty;[38][43] among their male colleagues were George Alexander, Allan Aynesworth, Albert Chevalier, Henry Kemble, William Terris, Brandon Thomas and Lewis Waller.
[1] Another commentator wrote, "Mrs Kendal, one of the best artists of her sex on the London stage, is in private life the epitome of all domestic virtues and graces".
[1] In February 1887 the Kendals gave a command performance of Gilbert's play Sweethearts for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, the first such entertainment at a royal residence since Prince Albert's death more than twenty years earlier.
The Kendals went on a short provincial tour, and later in the year they set out on their first American appearance, making their debut at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York with A Scrap of Paper, in October 1889.
The critic William Archer compared the two actresses in the title role: The Kendals then took the play to the US, where self-appointed guardians of morality condemned it, and audiences flocked to see it.
[47] During the Kendals' fifth and last tour of the US, from September 1894 to May 1895, they visited more than forty cities, presenting The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Lady Clancarty, Still Waters Run Deep, A Scrap of Paper, All for Her and The Ironmaster.
[55] W. H. Kendal died in 1917: his widow attributed his death to a broken heart caused by the scandal of their daughter Margaret's divorce.
[1][57] In December 1927 she presented the first award of the Kendal prize at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to actress Joyce Bland.
[1][57][59] Kendal is a featured character in the 1979 play The Elephant Man[60] and the unrelated 1980 film of the same name, both based on the life of Joseph Merrick.
[55] Gielgud wrote that many people, including James Agate, the leading critic of the time, "considered Madge Kendal the finest actress in England, a mistress of comedy and domestic drama even surpassing Ellen Terry".
)[62] Agate rated her above Edith Evans and Marie Tempest and in the same league as Ellen Terry, Mrs Patrick Campbell and Sybil Thorndike.
