On the Stage--and Off: The Brief Career of a Would-Be Actor

QUOTE from two more letters, and then I have done with this stock company. The first was written just after our star had set--or rather gone to the next town--the second about a...

I was of a sanguine disposition at that time, but I didn’t exactly see how I was going to make much of a sensation with _that_. It seemed to me that my talents were being thrown...

MONG the sham agents must be classed the “Professors,” or “X. Y. Z.’s,” who are always “able to place two or three” (never more than two or three: it would be no use four applyi...

REMAINED in London with my first manager during the whole summer season, which lasted about nine months, and I think that, altogether, it was the happiest period of my stage car...

E had no dress rehearsal. In the whole course of my professional life, I remember but one dress rehearsal. That was for a pantomime in the provinces. Only half the costumes arri...

HERE comes a time in every one’s life when he feels he was born to be an actor. Something within him tells him that he is the coming man, and that one day he will electrify the...

UR season at the London theater came to a close early in December, and, about the end of November, we all be gan to take a great interest in the last page but one of “The Actor’...

“... I’m afraid I shall have to trouble you to get me another wig. I thought my own hair would do for modern juvenile parts, but it isn’t considered light enough. ‘Be virtuous a...

HEY charged me extra for the basket on the Great Eastern Line, and I have hated that company ever since. Of course it was over weight, but actors are good customers to the railw...

“Dear Jim: If I stop long with this company I shall go mad (not very far to go, perhaps you’ll say!). I must get out of it soon. It’s the most wretched affair you could possibly...

HAD the stage all to myself for about half an hour. It is the etiquette of the theater for every one to be late. You estimate the position of an actor, by the time he is late fo...

I thought five a ridiculously small number at the time, especially when I remembered my amateur days, and the thirty or so rehearsals, nearly all full-dressed ones, required for...

LEFT London exactly twelve months from the day on which I had started to fulfill my first provincial engagement, and I did not return to it again while I was an actor. I left it...

T was not until about a week before the opening night, that I received a summons to attend at the theater. Eleven o’clock was the time appointed for “the company to assemble on...

N Saturday came the opening night, and with it my first appearance before the British public--my “first deboo” as our perruquier called it. In thinking about it beforehand, I ha...

THOUGHT I was safe for the summer with this company, and congratulated myself upon having found such good quarters. The glorious uncertainty of the boards, however, almost rival...

HAD a day in London before starting off on my next venture, and so looked in at my old theater. I knew none of the company, but the workmen and supers were mostly the same that...

HURRIEDLY unfolded the paper, to see what kind of a part I had got. I was anxious to begin studying it immediately. I had to form my conception of the character, learn the words...