Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson (16 January 1853 – 6 November 1937[1]) was an English actor and theatre manager and husband of actress Gertrude Elliott. He was considered the finest Hamlet of the Victorian era and one of the finest actors of his time, despite his dislike of the job and his lifelong belief that he was temperamentally unsuited to acting.[1]
Early life and education
Forbes-Robertson as Caesar
Born in London, he was the eldest of the eleven children of John Forbes-Robertson, a theatre critic and journalist from Aberdeen, and his wife Frances. One of his sisters, Frances (1866–1956), and two of his brothers, Ian Forbes-Robertson (1859–1936), Norman Forbes-Robertson (1858–1932) also became actors, with another brother, Eric Forbes-Robertson (1865–1935), becoming a notable artist. Through his wife Gertrude Elliott, he was the brother-in-law of famed actress Maxine Elliott, the uncle of Roy Harrod[2] the economist, and he was also the great-uncle of actress Meriel Forbes (granddaughter of his brother Norman), who married actor Ralph Richardson.
He was educated at Charterhouse. Originally intending to become an artist, he trained for three years at the Royal Academy. He began a theatrical career, out of a desire to be self-supporting, when the dramatist William Gorman Wills, who had seen him in private theatricals, offered him a role in his play Mary Queen of Scots.
Acting career
His many performances led him into, among other things, travel to the U.S., and work with Sir Henry Irving. He was hailed as one of the most individual and refined of English actors. He was a personal friend of the Duke of Sutherland and his family and often stayed with them at Trentham Hall; he is known to have recommended to them various writers and musicians in dire need of assistance.
I wrote Caesar and Cleopatra for Forbes-Robertson, because he is the classic actor of our day, and had a right to require such a service from me … Forbes-Robertson is the only actor I know who can find out the feeling of a speech from its cadence. His art meets the dramatist’s art directly, picking it up for completion and expression without explanations or imitations … Without him Caesar and Cleopatra would not have been written.[4]
Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Vanity Fair, 1895Portrait of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, George James Coates, c.1900-1925.newspaper advert for the film version of The Passing of the Third Floor Back 1918.
Forbes-Robertson's other notable roles were Romeo, Othello, Leontes in The Winter's Tale, and the leading role in The Passing of the Third Floor Back; performed on Broadway 1908 (filmed in 1916, released 1918). He did not play Hamlet until he was 44 years old, but after his success in the part he continued playing it until 1916, including a surviving silent film (1913). In a theatre review of Forbes-Robertson's performance in Hamlet published in The Saturday Review (2 October 1897) George Bernard Shaw wrote:
Nothing half so charming has been seen by this generation. It will bear seeing again and again. … His intellect is the organ of his passion. His eternal self-criticism is alive and thrilling as it can possible be. … Mr. Forbes-Robertson’s own performance has a continuous charm, interest and variety, which are the result not only of his well-known grace and accomplishment as an actor, but of a genuine delight – the rarest thing on our stage – in Shakespeare’s art, and a natural familiarity with the plane of his imagination.[5]
Forbes-Robertson was also a talented painter who did a portrait of his mentor Samuel Phelps that currently hangs in the Garrick Club in London. Forbes-Robertson acted in plays with the actress Mary Anderson in the 1880s. He became smitten with her, fell in love with her and asked her hand in marriage. She kindly turned him down though they remained friends. Later he and actress Beatrice Campbell enjoyed a brief affair during the time she starred with him in a series of Shakespearean plays in the mid-1890s.
Johnston Forbes-Robertson was knighted in 1913 at the age of 60, at which point he retired briefly from acting.[7]
He returned to the stage, however, for his first farewell tour of the US in 1914–1915. It began in with a three-month run in New York, then traveled the country using eight rail road freight cars to carry the sets, costumes and properties for eight shows; and two passenger cars for the actors and personnel.[8] His last appearance was at the Sanders Theatre in Boston with a performance of Hamlet.[9]
The second farewell tour followed; it traveled to 122 towns, beginning in Detroit in October 1915, with four plays. The tour traveled to Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco – where he learned of the birth of his fourth daughter, Diana. At this point they decided to reduce the itinerary to only three plays, by eliminating Caesar and Cleopatra from the repertoire. In his autobiography he describes how, on one early morning, the set, including the sphinx, was piled onto a beach and set on fire. The tour continued into Canada. His last performance as both Hamlet and as an actor, was in 1916 at the Sheldon Lecture Theatre of the University of Harvard, the stage of which had been made to replicate the stage of the Elizabethan Fortune Theatre especially for the Forbes-Robertson's performance.[8]
His literary works include The Life and Life-Work of Samuel Phelps (actor and theatre manager) as well as his own autobiography A Player Under Three Reigns (1925).[10]
Marriage and family
Memorial plaque, Bedford Square, London
In 1900, at age 47, he married American-born actress Gertrude Elliott (1874–1950), sister of Maxine Elliott, with whom he had four daughters.
^Shattuck, Charles Harlen. Shakespeare on the American Stage: From Booth and Barrett to Sothern and Marlowe. Associated University Presses, 1976. ISBN9780918016775 p. 205
^Shaw, George B. Shaw on Shakespeare. Dutton & Co. 1961. p. 85-92
^Peter Thomson, "Forbes-Robertson, Johnston" in The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, ed. Martin Banham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 383).
