Ellen Terry

A carte-de-visite portrait of the English actress Ellen Terry (1848-1928). She is seen here dressed as she appeared in an 1885 revival of Olivia by William Gorman Wills, an adaptation of The Vicar of Wakefield.

Born in Coventry in 1848, her father was a provincial actor. She never went to school and at the age of eight appeared as Mammilius in The Winter's Tale at the Prince's Theatre in London.

In 1864 she was married to the painter George Frederick Watts. Her husband was thirty years her senior, and the marriage, orchestrated by Julia Margaret Cameron and her sisters, was brief and unhappy. When the couple separated, Watts agreed to pay Ellen £300 annually, ‘so long as she shall live a chaste life’. The amount would drop to £200 if she returned to the stage. Three years later she defied conventional morality by living with the architect Edward Godwin. In 1875 she married the attractive actor Charles Kelly, but his drinking soon soured the relationship.

In 1907 she married her final husband, James Carew, another actor, four years younger than her own son.

Ellen Terry died at her home, Smallhythe Place near Rye in Kent, in 1928, her final years marred by blindness and dementia. Her house is now a museum.

Photographed by Herbert Rose Barraud of London and published by Waterlow and Sons Ltd.