Campbell, Patrick (Mrs)

1865

1940

A leading actress of her time, whom Bernard Shaw described as ‘perilously bewitching,’ Beatrice Stella Tanner was born on 9 February 1865 in Kensington, London. She was educated in Hampstead and Paris and received a scholarship for music at the Guildhall School. She married Patrick Campbell in 1884 and subsequently used that name for the stage even after her husband died in 1900 and she married Major George Cornwallis-West, in 1914. Her first professional appearance was with Ben Greet’s company as Sophia Moody in “The Bachelors” on 22 October 1888 at the Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool. After Liverpool she toured with Greet’s company throughout the provinces, acting such Shakespearean roles as Rosalind in “As You Like It” and Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. She appeared in London at the Adelphi in 1890 in “The Hunchback”, “The School for Scandal” and “As You Like It”. Her outstanding performance as Paula Tanqueray in Pinero’s “The Second Mrs Tanqueray” at the St James’s Theatre in 1893 established her as a leading actress. She returned to that role frequently during her subsequent forty-year career. In 1895 she acted Juliet to Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s Romeo, and also acted Ophelia to his Hamlet. Other notable performances by her included Hedda in “Hedda Gabler” (1907), Mélisande (in English and French, the latter to Sarah Bernhardt’s Pelléas), Mrs Alving in “Ghosts” and Lady Macbeth. Though she received high praise for her performances in London and New York of the title role in Sudermann’s “Magda”, Bernard Shaw disapproved, and he also criticised her Rita in “Little Eyolf” (the role in which she is pictured in G0101). Nevertheless, Shaw wrote for her the role of Eliza Doolittle in his “Pygmalion”, which she created on 11 April 1914 at Her Majesty’s Theatre; on her return to New York that year she acted that role at the Park Theatre on 12 October and toured America during the 1914-15 season. In London during the 1920s she acted a number of her favourite roles, returned to New York in 1927, and back at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in July 1927 began a series of speeches on ‘Diction in Dramatic Art.’ In 1929 at the Royalty Theatre she was excellent as Anastasia in “The Matriarch”, a play based on a novel by G. B. Stern. She made her film debut in 1933 in “Riptide” and was in several other films. Mrs Campbell’s correspondence with Shaw, edited by Alan Dent, was published in 1952, twelve years after her death. An arrangement of those letters by Jerome Kilty, “Dear Liar”, had a successful stage run in America and London in 1959-60, with Kilty as Shaw and Cavenda Humphrey as Mrs Campbell, and was published in 1960. Biographies of Mrs Campbell by Alan Dent and Margot Peters were published in 1961 and 1984, respectively. (EB, OCT, WWWT)