Tom Terriss

Tom Terriss, born Thomas Herbert F. Lewin on 28 September 1872 in Barnes, London, was a British actor, screenwriter, and film director who worked across stage and screen over several decades. He died on 8 February 1964. The son of leading man actor William Terriss and his wife Isabel, née Lewis, he was the brother of musical comedy star Ellaline Terriss. He was educated at Christ's Hospital.

Before pursuing a career in the theatre, Terriss worked in a succession of unrelated occupations, describing himself as sharing his father's roving disposition. He served as an apprentice at sea, farmed sheep in Australia, worked as a miner in Colorado, and held a clerical position on the London Stock Exchange. He eventually turned to acting, making his professional debut at the Globe Theatre in March 1890, playing Osric in Hamlet with F. R. Benson's company. That same year he began a three-year association with the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, appearing first in Paul Kauvar and then in A Million of Money, The Prodigal Daughter in 1892, and three pantomimes.

Over the following decade Terriss took on a wide range of productions, from musical comedies such as The Shop Girl to melodramas including The Colleen Bawn. In 1902 he traveled to the United States, where he spent four years performing in musical comedies under the management of Charles Frohman and others. His Broadway appearances during this period, in 1904, included Letty and the musical The Medal and the Maid. He returned to the West End in 1906, assuming the role of Mr. Beverley in The Beauty of Bath, in which his sister Ellaline starred in the title role.

Terriss continued to work on both sides of the Atlantic in the years that followed. In 1909 he toured the United States and the United Kingdom in The Vampire, and in 1910 and 1911 he undertook another American tour in Scrooge. Between 1913 and 1915 he appeared in Britain in three adaptations of works by Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and Nicholas Nickleby.

Following the First World War, Terriss left the stage and transitioned to a career in film, becoming a director for Vitagraph Pictures and working in that capacity for approximately a decade.