Viola Tree

Viola Tree (17 July 1884 – 15 November 1938) was an English actress, singer, playwright, and author born in London. The eldest daughter of actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree and actress Helen Maud Tree, née Holt, she was the niece of author Constance Beerbohm and of writer Max Beerbohm. Her sisters were Felicity Tree and Iris Tree. Among her father's seven illegitimate children were director Carol Reed and Peter Reed, whose son became the actor Oliver Reed. Tree received her education privately in London and in Europe.

Although she had originally intended to pursue a singing career, Tree entered the acting profession in 1904, making her London debut in March of that year as Viola in Twelfth Night. For the following four years she performed in her father's productions at His Majesty's Theatre, taking on a range of Shakespeare roles that included Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, the Queen in Richard II, Ariel in The Tempest, Anne Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ophelia in Hamlet, and Perdita in The Winter's Tale, the latter production featuring Ellen Terry as Hermione. Her operatic ambitions persisted alongside her stage work, and in 1910 she appeared in the title role of Iphigénie en Tauride and as Euridice in Orfeo ed Euridice at the Savoy Theatre before traveling to Milan to study. On her return she did not continue in opera, apart from reprising the role of Euridice in 1912, and instead built her career in plays and variety. Her final Shakespeare role was Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1923.

In 1912, Tree married drama critic Alan Parsons, who died in 1933 at the age of 44. They had two sons, including actor David Tree, and a daughter, Virginia Penelope Parsons (1917–2003), who became the wife of David Tennant and subsequently of the 6th Marquess of Bath. In 1919, Tree took on the management of the Aldwych Theatre, where she achieved particular success presenting the works of Sacha Guitry, while continuing her own performing career.

Tree's Broadway credits include the 1930 play The Truth Game, part of a stay in the United States during 1930–31 in which she appeared on Broadway and on tour in drama and also performed in the Ziegfeld Follies. Back in London through the 1930s, she appeared regularly in West End comedies and took on directing work, staging the Italian play La Piccola by Massimo Bontempelli in the original Italian in 1930 and directing Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Castor et Pollux for the Oxford University Opera Club in 1934. In 1931 she starred in the play For the Love of Mike and appeared in its film adaptation the following year.

As a playwright, Tree collaborated with actor-manager Gerald du Maurier under the joint pen name Hubert Parsons on The Dancers, which opened at Wyndham's Theatre in 1923, starring Tallulah Bankhead in her London debut. The production ran for 349 performances before transferring to the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway, where it ran for 133 performances. Her second play, The Swallow, addressed the rise of Italian Fascism and was produced in London in 1925. Tree also appeared in four films between 1920 and 1938, the last of which was the 1938 George Bernard Shaw adaptation Pygmalion, in which she played a cameo role alongside her son David Tree. That production completed three generations of the Tree family's association with the play, as her father had created the role of Henry Higgins in the London stage premiere in 1914 and Tree herself had revived the play in 1920.

Among her published works were her memoirs, Castles in the Air (1926); a biography of her husband; a novel; the etiquette volume Can I Help You? (1937); and the anthology Alan Parsons' Book (1937). Her final West End appearance was in The Melody that Got Lost in January 1938. Tree was also an early advocate for the establishment of a National Theatre. She died of pleurisy in London on 15 November 1938, at the age of 54.