Johnston Forbes-Robertson

Johnston Forbes-Robertson (16 January 1853 – 6 November 1937) was an English actor, theatre manager, and painter, born in London as the eldest of eleven children of John Forbes-Robertson, a theatre critic and journalist from Aberdeen, and his wife Frances. He was educated at Charterhouse and originally trained for three years at the Royal Academy with the intention of becoming an artist. His theatrical career began when dramatist William Gorman Wills, having observed him in private theatricals, offered him a role in the play Mary Queen of Scots. Despite a career that brought him widespread recognition, Forbes-Robertson reportedly believed throughout his life that he was temperamentally unsuited to acting.

Several of his siblings also entered the performing arts. His sister Frances (1866–1956) and brothers Ian Forbes-Robertson (1859–1936) and Norman Forbes-Robertson (1858–1932) all became actors, while brother Eric Forbes-Robertson (1865–1935) became a notable artist. In 1900, at the age of 47, Forbes-Robertson married American-born actress Gertrude Elliott, the sister of actress Maxine Elliott. Through this marriage he became the brother-in-law of Maxine Elliott and the uncle of economist Roy Harrod. The couple had four daughters: Maxine, known as Blossom, who married aircraft designer F. G. Miles and became a director and designer of the Miles Aircraft company; Jean, who became an actress and through whom Forbes-Robertson is the grandfather of actress Joanna Van Gyseghem; Chloe (1909–1947), an artist; and Diana (1914–1988), a writer who later authored a biography of her aunt Maxine Elliott. Forbes-Robertson was also the great-uncle of actress Meriel Forbes, granddaughter of his brother Norman, who married actor Ralph Richardson.

Forbes-Robertson first rose to prominence playing second leads to Sir Henry Irving before establishing himself as one of the most individual and refined English actors of his era. An early success came in W. S. Gilbert's Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith, and in 1882 he starred alongside Lottie Venne and Marion Terry in G. W. Godfrey's comedy The Parvenu at the Court Theatre. He also acted with Mary Anderson in the 1880s, and during the mid-1890s he and actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell had a brief affair while she starred with him in a series of Shakespearean productions. His notable stage roles included Romeo, Othello, Leontes in The Winter's Tale, and the title role in Hamlet, which he did not take on until the age of 44. After his success in the part, he continued performing it until 1916, including in a surviving silent film made in 1913. George Bernard Shaw, writing in The Saturday Review on 2 October 1897, praised the performance in detail, describing Forbes-Robertson's portrayal as possessing continuous charm, interest, and variety, and crediting him with a genuine familiarity with Shakespeare's imagination.

Shaw also wrote the role of Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra specifically for Forbes-Robertson, stating that Forbes-Robertson was the only actor he knew who could determine the feeling of a speech from its cadence, and that without him the play would not have been written. Forbes-Robertson brought Caesar and Cleopatra to Broadway, where he performed from 1903 to 1913. His Broadway credits include Caesar and Cleopatra, The Light That Failed, Mice and Men, Hamlet, and The Passing of the Third Floor Back, the latter of which he performed on Broadway in 1908 and which was subsequently filmed, with a release in 1918.

On 26 November 1908, Forbes-Robertson chaired the inaugural meeting of the Actresses' Franchise League at the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly Circus, London. Dame Madge Kendal served as the league's first president, and his wife Gertrude Elliott became its second president the following year. Forbes-Robertson was a regular speaker at suffrage events. He was knighted in 1913 at the age of 60, after which he briefly retired from acting.

He returned to the stage for a farewell tour of the United States in 1914–1915, beginning with a three-month run in New York before traveling the country with eight railroad freight cars carrying sets, costumes, and properties for eight productions, and two passenger cars for the company. His last appearance on that tour was at Sanders Theatre in Boston, where he performed Hamlet. A second farewell tour followed, beginning in Detroit in October 1915 and traveling to 122 towns including Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco, where he learned of the birth of his fourth daughter, Diana. Caesar and Cleopatra was eventually dropped from the repertoire during this tour, and in his autobiography Forbes-Robertson describes the sphinx and other set pieces being piled onto a beach and burned. His final performance as Hamlet, and as an actor, took place in 1916 at the Sheldon Lecture Theatre at Harvard University, whose stage had been constructed to replicate the Elizabethan Fortune Theatre.

Beyond performing, Forbes-Robertson was a talented painter who completed a portrait of his mentor Samuel Phelps, which hangs in the Garrick Club in London. He also authored The Life and Life-Work of Samuel Phelps and his own autobiography, A Player Under Three Reigns, published in 1925. A statue of Forbes-Robertson by sculptor Brenda Putnam, created in 1932, is held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He died on 6 November 1937 at St. Margaret's Bay, near Dover, Kent, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in London on 9 November. Memorial services were held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Westminster.