Amy Coleridge

Amy Coleridge, born Amy Matilda Cowlrick on 25 May 1864 at St Pancras in London, was a British actress whose career spanned stage work in England, South Africa, and the United States. She was the daughter of Adelaide née Jackson and Charles Cowlrick, a commercial clerk. She died on 4 August 1951 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

On 1 February 1884, Coleridge married English actor William Haviland in Chicago. The couple had two children: Frederick Alexander Irwin, born in 1884, who became an actor, and Ellen Winifred Irwin, born in 1887. In 1886, both Coleridge and Haviland joined the Lyceum Theatre company under Henry Irving, where she took on the role of Alice in Faust that same year, Ursula in Much Ado About Nothing, and Julie Lesurques in The Lyons Mail in 1893. She also appeared in The Lady of Lyons alongside Haviland during John Martin-Harvey's Lyceum Theatre Company tour of the provinces in 1888.

Coleridge developed a substantial body of work in South Africa. In 1895, she and Haviland traveled there as members of the Holloway Theatre Company, during which she played Desdemona in Othello and Cordelia in King Lear on tour. She returned to South Africa in 1897 with the Haviland and Lawrence Shakespearian and Dramatic Company, a troupe directed by her husband and co-managed with Gerald Lawrence, for a season of Shakespearean productions.

By 1900, Coleridge was back in London working again with John Martin-Harvey's company, appearing as Marie in Louis XI at the Lyceum Theatre. In 1902 she joined Martin-Harvey on his sixth American tour, which brought her to Broadway. Her Broadway credits that year included Rouget De L'Isle, The Children of Kings, and The Only Way. The following year she appeared opposite Martin-Harvey as Margaret Hungerford in The Breed of the Treshams in 1903.

Coleridge's marriage to Haviland ended in divorce in 1904 following her adultery with actor Percy Anstey. She married Anstey in 1906 after the divorce was finalized, and later married Archibald Brough Pearce in 1915 following her divorce from Anstey. In her later years, Coleridge is believed to have returned to South Africa to act for Leonard Rayne and subsequently worked as a speech and drama teacher.