Gertrude Kingston

Gertrude Kingston, born Gertrude Angela Kohnstamm on 24 September 1862 in Islington, London, was an English actress, actor-manager, and artist who performed on Broadway between 1916 and 1926. The daughter of merchant Heiman Kohnstamm and his wife Teresina, née Friedmann, she was raised in a Jewish household and privately educated, traveling widely with her mother and governess. Her brother was Edwin Max Konstam, a legal author and county court judge. Kingston studied painting in Berlin and Paris and later published three illustrated books.

Her earliest theatrical experiences came in childhood, when she performed amateur impersonations of celebrated actors including Henry Irving and Sarah Bernhardt. At fifteen, W. S. Gilbert selected her to play the lead in an amateur production of Broken Hearts. Her marriage in 1889 to Captain George Silver of the East Surrey Regiment prompted her to pursue professional acting as a means of financial support. On the advice of Ellen Terry, she enrolled in the School of Acting run by actor-manager Sarah Thorne in Margate, where she played Ophelia in Hamlet and Emilia in Othello, as well as Penelope in English-language versions of The Tale of Troy and Clytemnestra in Aeschylus' Agamemnon.

Kingston's professional career advanced steadily through the 1890s. In 1894 she appeared in The Charlatan at the Haymarket Theatre for Robert Buchanan, and subsequently joined Herbert Beerbohm Tree's company to play Mrs. Harkaway in Partners. She went on to appear as Clara Dexter in The Woodbarrow, which she also produced, and as Mrs. Graves in A Matchmaker, a play she co-wrote with Clotilde Graves that attracted notoriety for its comparison of marriage to prostitution. Following the death of her husband in 1899, just before the Boer War, Kingston raised subscriptions to open a nursing hut for British troops in South Africa.

Her career continued to develop in the early twentieth century through associations with significant theatrical figures and institutions. In 1905 she appeared at the Royal Court Theatre as Helen in Euripides' The Trojan Women and as Aurora Bompas in Bernard Shaw's How He Lied to Her Husband, opposite Harley Granville-Barker. That same year, John Singer Sargent executed her portrait in charcoal. In 1910 she became the lessee and actor-manager of the Little Theatre in the Adelphi, London, opening her season with Aristophanes' Lysistrata in a version adapted by Lawrence Housman, in which she played the title role. In 1911, after Lillah McCarthy took over the lease, Kingston returned to the Little Theatre under McCarthy's management to play Madame Arcadina in The Seagull. In 1912 she played Lady Cecily Waynflete in Captain Brassbound's Conversion, and in 1913 George Bernard Shaw wrote the title role of Great Catherine specifically for her.

Kingston spent much of World War I in the United States, where she gave talks about the British war effort. In Boston she appeared in three plays by Shaw, including Great Catherine. Her Broadway career began in 1916, when she appeared with her own theatrical company — billed as Gertrude Kingston and a Visiting Company — in productions that included The Queen's Enemies and four Shaw plays: The Inca of Perusalem, Great Catherine, Overruled, and How He Lied to Her Husband. She also played Ermyntrude in The Inca of Perusalem with the Pioneer Players, the women's suffrage theatre company, having been a speaker on behalf of the suffrage movement in Britain for some years. Also in 1916, she organized a war charities revue in London in aid of the Star and Garter Home. Her Broadway appearances continued through 1926 and included the play Red Blinds and Overruled.

After the war Kingston returned to Britain, resumed her acting career, and became a regular speaker for the Conservative Party, with consideration given in 1924 to standing for Parliament. She taught public speaking and worked as a journalist. In 1927 an exhibition of her lacquer work was held in New York City, with her technique becoming known as "Kingston lacquer," and that same year she produced and appeared in Nevertheless in London. Her final stage performance came in 1932, when she played Elizabeth I in When Essex Died. Kingston's autobiography, Curtsey While You're Thinking, was published in 1937, the same year she died on 7 November at the Empire Nursing Home in Westminster, London, at the age of 75.