A Pride of Terrys

Résumé · For more than a century the name of Terry has stood for the aristocracy of the English Theatre. This great and prolific family, deriving from a Portsmouth publican, includes in its ramifications the names of Craig, Hawtrey and Gielgud, which currently represent it in the theatre and on television and radio. The subject of the book-'a picture of us all'- was suggested to the author in 1921 by the late Dame Ellen Terry, with whom, up to the latter's death in 1928, Marguerite Steen was on terms of close friendship. As a member of the Julia Neilson-Fred Terry Company she formed futther ties with the family, unconsciously gathering the material from which this panorama-the author describes it as a kind of Frith's Derby Day-was fashioned. 'A Pride of Terrys' in no sense professes to be a theatre text-book; it is a family saga, a series of character studies portraying the qualities that brought Terrys from very humble beginnings to their proud pre-eminence in the contemporary theatre. Parallel with the development of the Legend runs theatrical and social history, with its effects on the protagonists. The numerous photographs which illustrate the book are all from private, non-theatrical sources; the majority of them have never previously appeared in print.