Sarah Siddons, The First Celebrity Actress

Sarah Siddons has had walk-on parts in most of the many works on actors and celebrity that have appeared over the past twenty years or so. Surprisingly, however, there has not been a single figure study of Siddons since the 1970s, perhaps because of the current tendency to look at female actors in related groups, as divas or rivals, as pregnant or aging, or as enmeshed in “star” systems. Jo Willett’s lively and highly readable biography therefore fills a gap and offers in a traditional cradle to grave style a well-researched and rounded portrait of Siddons.Siddons was born into an acting family: her grandparents’ marriage represented a merger between the Wards and the Butchers and their midlands and Western circuits. Her mother’s marriage to Roger Kemble brought him into the company, which by 1766 was renamed Mr. Kemble’s Company of Comedians (5). Siddons’s siblings, above all her brother, John Philip Kemble, participated in her theatrical performances. William “Sid” Siddons, repeatedly dismissed by Willett as a mediocre actor and problematic spouse, was also part of that world of incredibly resilient and energetic entertainers. All the members of the Wards and Kemble company and family worked hard on tour, but the women of these companies who took their fifth-act bow and then tottered off to give birth are extraordinary. Siddons had two children by the age of twenty and fits into this gritty tradition, but she also elevated it. Willett rightly dwells on Siddons’s famous farewell to the Theatre Royal in Bath in 1782 flanked by the “elves,” her children, an appearance much commented on at the time (35–37). Siddons at twenty-seven was fashioning her image, and excusing her ambition (the move to Drury Lane), by emphasizing her maternal solicitude and nobility.Willett does a good job of describing the talented artistic metropolitan world Siddons entered in 1782, admired by the royal family, and with friendships that included Frances Burney, Anne Damer, and Elizabeth Inchbald. Siddons was depicted in a variety of poses and roles by the leading painters of the day Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, and Joshua Reynolds, and had a warm, possibly intimate relationship with Lawrence. He was also in love with and loved by her daughters, Sarah and Maria. Siddons appeared onstage in the same era as such leading-female actors as Frances Abington and Dorothy Jordan, both supreme in comedy, a genre Siddons’s avoided. Siddons’s career was not limited to the London stage; her travel agendas are impressive, putting in appearances from Ireland to Scotland and most places in between, including Cheltenham where I now live and where a pub, The Sarah Siddons, was built on the site of a theatre where she performed to great acclaim. Willett stresses that Siddons was the family wage earner, and a very successful one, who was able to purchase a pleasant house in Westbourne Green, near Paddington. The emphasis in this study is as much or more on Siddons’s family life than her professional career. In this Willett is aided and even guided by the nineteenth-century biographies of James Boaden and above all Thomas Campbell to whom Siddons gave many of her letters. Willett throughout traces a contrast between Siddons’s successful life on stage and her less than happy married life—“Sid” infected her with syphilis—as well as her grief and guilt over the deaths of her daughters, Sarah and Maria. Indeed, for Willett, Siddons’s situation is one we recognize today in her “status as a beleaguered working mother” (183). I wish Willett did not so quickly refer to people by their first names (Sarah for Siddons, Dora for Dorothy Jordan, Fanny for Frances Burney) or offer so many speculative “insights” into what “Sarah” might have felt.The book is well illustrated with thirty black-and-white pictures as well as a sumptuous cover with colored portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds. The claim that this book provides a portrait of the “First Celebrity Actress” is questionable—there are so many contenders for this title—although the suggestion Willett makes in her epilogue that Siddons’s success and high-minded seriousness opened the way for later professional women actors is reasonable (182). Celebrity, particularly in relation to women actors, has been thoroughly discussed in the past twenty or more years. Many of the authors one associates with this trend, amongst them Joseph Roach, Felicity Nussbaum, and Heather McPherson, are listed in the bibliography. However, there is no real discussion of celebrity as such, of how it differs (or not) from fame, what forces were at work to turn renown into “celebrity,” or why stage performers were so especially celebrated. Nevertheless, this book provides pleasant reading especially for the those interested in Siddons and the eighteenth-century stage but not immersed in these topics. Hence, the two appendices, the first describing the important people in Siddons’s life and the second giving plot outlines of plays most associated with her starring roles, are a thoughtful addition (185–200).