Cyril Maude

Cyril Francis Maude was born in London on 24 April 1862, the eldest son of Captain Charles Henry Maude of the Indian Army and the Honorable Georgina Hanbury-Tracy, whose father was Thomas Hanbury-Tracy, 2nd Baron Sudeley. Maude was educated at Wixenford and Charterhouse School before being sent to Adelaide, South Australia, in 1881 aboard the clipper ship City of Adelaide for reasons of health. He returned to Britain without having recovered, but with a firm intention to pursue acting. He trained under Charles Cartwright and Roma Le Thiere, though further health difficulties compelled him to leave England again. Traveling to Canada and the United States, he made his professional acting debut with Daniel Bandman's company in Denver, Colorado, in 1884.

From 1896 to 1905, Maude served as co-manager of the Haymarket Theatre in London alongside Frederick Harrison, where he built a reputation for quietly humorous performances across a wide range of roles. In 1900, he managed a production of The Little Minister at the Regent Theatre in Salford. He moved into independent management in 1906 and opened the Playhouse in London in 1907. Between 1911 and 1919 he worked largely in the United States, performing in new comedies, before returning to London in 1919 and establishing himself at the Criterion Theatre.

Maude's Broadway career spanned 1913 to 1925 and included appearances in several notable productions. Among these were The Saving Grace, Aren't We All?, and These Charming People. In 1923 he toured the United States in If Winter Comes alongside Lydia Bilbrook and Mabel Terry-Lewis, playing Chicago in April of that year before bringing the production to New York in the autumn. He became particularly associated with the role in Grumpy, playing a retired lawyer who solves a crime to protect those he loves, a production he also took on tour through Australia, performing in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney.

In 1905, Maude succeeded Sir Henry Irving as President of the Actors' Orphanage Fund. During his tenure, which lasted until 1914, he established the first orphanage for actors' children at Croydon, introduced new fundraising methods, secured royal patronage, and recruited leading actors to serve on the committee.

Maude appeared in a number of films from the 1910s onward, including Beauty and the Barge in 1914, Peer Gynt and The Greater Will in 1915, and Grumpy in 1930. His final screen appearance came in 1947, when he appeared in While the Sun Shines at the age of eighty-five.

In 1888, Maude married actress Winifred Emery, daughter of Samuel Anderson Emery and granddaughter of actor John Emery. Their children included Margery Maude, who became an actress; Pamela Cynthia Maude, born in 1893; and John Cyril Maude, who went on to become a barrister, judge, and Member of Parliament. Pamela married Major William La Touche Congreve on 1 June 1916; he was killed in action on 20 July 1916 and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Pamela subsequently married the Honorable William Fraser on 22 December 1919. The family also raised a niece, Winifred Isabel Emery, after she was abandoned by her father in 1895. That niece was later present, along with her pupil Ruby Preece, when dramatist W. S. Gilbert died in his lake at Grim's Dyke in May 1911, and she became the mother of poet David Gascoyne.

Maude died at Torquay, Devon, on 20 February 1951, at the age of eighty-eight.