Louis Calvert

Louis James Calvert (25 November 1859 – 18 July 1923) was a British stage and film actor, actor-manager, and acting teacher whose career spanned from the late nineteenth century through the early 1920s. Born in Manchester, Lancashire, he was the third son among eight children of actors Charles Alexander Calvert and Adelaide Calvert. He received his early education privately in Manchester and in Germany. Despite active discouragement from his parents regarding a stage career, Calvert made his theatrical debut in Natal, South Africa, in 1878, subsequently performing in Australia before returning to Britain in 1880. During the 1880s he trained at Sarah Thorne's School of Acting in Margate, Kent, and went on to perform alongside Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London, as well as touring the United States with Lillie Langtry.

Calvert's early career included playing Mark Antony opposite Frank Benson's Julius Caesar, and in 1895 he staged an Elizabethan-style production of Richard II for the Manchester Committee of the Independent Theatre Society. That production brought him to the attention of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who engaged him as co-producer on Henry IV, Part 1 at the Haymarket Theatre in May 1896 and on Julius Caesar at Her Majesty's Theatre in January 1898. He appeared in Ben Greet's 1897 production of Macbeth at the Olympic Theatre, and in 1899 played Casca in Tree's Julius Caesar as well as Cardinal Pandulf in The Life and Death of King John. His performance in the latter was captured on film as King John (1899), recognized as the earliest known Shakespeare-based film. For Tree at the Haymarket, Calvert also played Francis Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1900 and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing in 1905. Of his Dogberry, Bernard Shaw wrote in the Saturday Review that Calvert made the dialogue clear, expressive, and vivid without the least preoccupation.

Calvert's association with Shaw proved a defining element of his career. In 1904, under the management of J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker at the Court Theatre, he created the role of Tom Broadbent in John Bull's Other Island. At the same theatre he appeared in You Never Can Tell in 1905, and in November of that year created the role of Andrew Undershaft in the premiere of Major Barbara. He also appeared in the silent film David Garrick in 1911 and published two books: An Actor's Hamlet with Mills and Boon in 1912, and Problems of the Actor with Simpkin Marshall in 1919.

In 1909 Calvert was appointed actor-manager of the New Theatre in New York, where his responsibilities included directing and starring in productions of English plays, with particular emphasis on Shakespeare, using a company of both British and American actors. The first production under his management, Antony and Cleopatra in November 1909 starring E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, was not a success, nor was Twelfth Night in January 1910. His staging of A Winter's Tale in March 1910, however, achieved success through ensemble acting and Elizabethan staging methods. He directed Major Barbara at the Playhouse Theatre in New York City in 1915 and an Elizabethan-style production of The Tempest for the Shakespeare tercentenary in 1916. His Broadway appearances, which extended from 1909 to 1923, included Dear Brutus, Major Barbara, The Masquerader, R.U.R., and What the Public Wants, among other productions.

In his later years Calvert taught Shakespearean acting at various American universities and academies. In 1921 he created the role of Dr. Ruiz in the premiere of Tom Cushing's Blood and Sand, and in 1922 he appeared with Richard Bennett in the English adaptation of Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped. That same year he played Alquist in the American premiere of Karel Čapek's R.U.R. His final stage appearance was in The Adding Machine, which ran from March to May 1923.

Calvert married twice. His first marriage, to actress Rose Roberts, born Rosina Matilda Ralph (1844–1915), took place at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on 18 April 1886 and was later dissolved. He subsequently married actress Violet Fenton, with whom he had two daughters, Beatrice "Ray" Calvert and Patricia Calvert. Calvert died on 18 July 1923 at his home on West 55th Street in New York City.