Kemble, Elizabeth

1762?

1841

Born about 1762 in London, Elizabeth Satchell was the daughter of John Satchell, a musical instrument maker of Great Pulteney Street, Golden Square. She had at least three sisters who went on the stage (see the BDA, 8: 403). Elizabeth made her debut at Covent Garden as Polly in “The Beggar’s Opera” on 21 September 1780, when it was reported that her person was ‘exquisitely pleasing.’ Other roles followed: Ophelia, Patty in “The Maid of the Mill”, Cecilia in “The Son-in-Law” and Constantia in the premier of Macklin’s comedy “The Man of Mode”, on 10 May 1781. Reviewers claimed that she showed promise. Over the next several seasons she made steady progress, and, noted as a ‘rising actress,’ in 1783-84 she appeared as Juliet, Perdita, Desdemona and Cordelia. On 29 November 1783 Elizabeth married the Covent Garden actor Stephen Kemble (q.v.), the son of Roger and Sarah Kemble and the brother of John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons. When her husband was discharged from Covent Garden at the end of 1783-84, Mrs Kemble went with him to play in the north. She made her debut at Edinburgh in January 1786 as Desdemona. She was back in London at the Haymarket in the summer of 1787, when she was the original Yarico in Colman’s “Inkle and Yarico” on 4 August. She played at the Haymarket regularly in the summers through 1796. Though she appeared over the following years in various provincial theatres, her career was mainly at Edinburgh, helping her husband manage, between 1792 and 1800. There she acted about 150 roles that ran the spectrum of the eighteenth-century female repertory. When the Edinburgh enterprise bankrupted them, Mrs Kemble returned to London to make her first and only appearance at Drury Lane, as Ophelia, on 29 October 1800, when her brothers-in-law John and Charles Kemble acted Hamlet and Laertes, respectively . Elizabeth Kemble died on 20 January 1841 at the Grove, near Durham, and was buried at Durham Cathedral by the side of her husband (who had died some nineteen years earlier). James Boaden, the biographer of J. P. Kemble and Sarah Siddons, praised Elizabeth warmly, writing that ‘The stage never in my time exhibited so pure, so interesting a character as Miss Satchell.’ Other critics said that she possessed an elegant figure and a ‘natural and impressive style.’ Her Juliet was ‘delicious’ and her Yarico was ‘incomparable.’ Her children Frances Crawford Kemble (1787-1849) and Henry Stephen Kemble (1789-1836) had stage careers and are noticed in the BDA.