Stirling, Fanny, 1815-1895

Mary Anne (Fanny) Stirling (1815 – 28 December 1895) was an English actress renowned for her comedy roles in a career for over fifty years. Stirling was born in Mayfair on 29 July 1815, the daughter of Mary Ann (born Spense) and a spendthrift father Captain Simon Kehl. She appeared as Zephyrina, the widow, in The Devil and the Widow at the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel in January 1832. Later that year she married the playwright Edward Lambert. They worked together and they were known as Mr and Mrs Stirling and her husband's first play was Sadak and Kalasrade which was performed in Theatre Royal, Birmingham in 1835. Having been successful as Celia in As You Like It and Sophia in The Road to Ruin, Macready gave her an opportunity to play Cordelia to his Lear, and Madeline Weir to his James V in the Rev. James White's King of the Commons. In 1852 she created Peg Woffington in Reade and Taylor's Masks and Faces. Meanwhile, she had married Edward Stirling (d. 1894), an actor, manager and dramatic author. Stirling as the nurse and Ellen Terry as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is a painting by Anna Lea Merritt In later years Mrs Stirling gained a new popularity as the nurse in Irving's presentation (1882) of Romeo and Juliet where she was said to "steal the show" from a cast that included Ellen Terry but she returned to the role in 1884 with Mary Anderson; and she was the Martha in Irving's production of Faust (1885). She died on 28 December 1895, having in the previous year married Sir Charles Hutton Gregory (1817–1898). She is buried in Brompton Cemetery; at her request there were very few mourners, one of whom was the actor-manager Squire Bancroft.