(Alice) Ellen Terry was born in Coventry in 1847, the daughter of an actor and actress. In 1856, she made her first appearance on the stage as the boy Mamillius in The Winter's Tale at the Princess's Theatre, London. After a brief marriage in 1864 to the painter, George Frederic Watts, Terry established herself as Britain's foremost Shakespearean actress. In 1878, she began an association with Henry Irving at the Lyceum, playing the leading female parts in all Irving's productions until 1896. After parting from Irving, Terry became an actor-manager in 1903, helping to popularise the work of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. Between 1910 and 1915, she went on a lecture-tour of the United States, England and Australia. In 1925, she was created G.B.E. Declining into blindness and with failing health; she died in 1928 at Tenterden, Kent.
From the guide to the Ellen Terry collection, 1904, (Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)
