The Actors of Their Age

The most popular actor of the Restoration, Betterton distinguished himself in restrained, unexaggerated performances as Macbeth, Lear, Brutus, Hotspur, and other roles. Short and stout, with a large head and feet, he seemed clumsy onstage but had a remarkably expressive voice. Betterton began his career with the Duke's Company, which later merged with the King's Men—Shakespeare's company, renamed after the succession of James I.

In 1741, Garrick changed English acting forever as Richard III. Rejecting the French tradition of stately poses and declamatory line readings, he strove for a more natural speech and manner with gestures, tics, and dramatic pauses infused with emotion. As co-owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, he also bucked tradition off stage. He refused to discount admission for those who left early, moved the orchestra from the gallery to the ground floor, and eliminated the stage's front apron on which actors delivered soliloquies.

Sister of noted Shakespearean actors John Philip Kemble and Charles Kemble, Siddons earned acclaim for her portrayals of Desdemona, Rosalind, and Ophelia. But Lady Macbeth made her famous. One contemporary journalist wrote, "Her voice is naturally plaintive ... yet ... becomes at will sonorous or piercing, overwhelms with rage, or, in its wild shriek, absolutely harrows up the soul." In 1775, Siddons became the first woman to play Hamlet—establishing a minor tradition of gender-bending casting that continued later with Sarah Bernhardt and Judith Anderson.

Kean emphasized movement in an era when actors stood still and struck poses while delivering lines. His fiery performances prompted the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write, "Seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." In his Drury Lane debut, Kean further departed from other actors by investing his Shylock with dignity, vigor, and intellect—unlike previous incarnations as a fiendish geezer or comic villain. Kean was also the first to resurrect King Lear with its tragic ending intact in 1823. Since 1681, English audiences had seen only Nahum Tate's prettified adaptation in which Lear survives and reconciles with Cordelia, who marries Edgar. Audiences found Kean's production intolerably sad, however, and it failed miserably.

The American Edwin Booth brought physical grace and understated style to his performances. Best known for his Hamlet, he expressed the character's intellectual melancholy with a quiet sensitivity that contrasted sharply with the inflated, stentorian style common in his day. His subdued passion defied the tradition embodied by his father, the famous English actor Junius Booth, who attacked roles with such overwrought intensity that he actually endangered fellow actors in fight scenes. Booth's younger brother and fellow actor, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

Although not the first woman to perform Hamlet, "The Divine Sarah" certainly became the most famous at it. Saying she preferred "not male parts but male brains," Bernhardt tackled the role as an intellectual challenge. Her Hamlet debuted in Paris in 1899, then traveled to London and the U.S., where it received mixed reviews. From Paris, the New York Times hailed her "amazing mix of intuition and subtlety of perception," but in London, critic Max Beerbohm wanted to laugh at the incongruous picture she presented. Undaunted, Bernhardt later played Shylock; her other Shakespearean roles included Cordelia, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra.

The first actor ever knighted, Sir Henry Irving partnered professionally with Ellen Terry in 1878, and the two dominated Shakespearean theater in Britain for decades. He played Hamlet to her Ophelia, Shylock to her Portia, and so on.

Though not a conventional beauty, Terry cut an elegant and graceful figure onstage. George Bernard Shaw praised her intelligence and naturalistic acting and wrote several parts for her. In an American lecture tour in 1910, she noted that Shakespeare's heroines had much in common with her contemporary "feminine revolutionaries"—especially Portia, her most famous role.

Irving had a weak voice and spoke in odd rhythms and unusual pronunciations. But he seems to have used action and sheer force of will to define his characters. One contemporary noted, "He drew a character in sharp, sudden, delicate, superb movements, each guided by a craftsmanship on which he had worked ... almost inhuman concentration."

Unlike Henry Irving, Forbes-Robertson earned renown as a master of elocution. He studied under Irving and eventually rivaled his mentor in popularity, particularly for his portrayal of Hamlet. After seeing him in this role, George Bernard Shaw wrote, "There is none of the strange Lyceum intensity which comes from the perpetual struggle between Sir Henry Irving and Shakespeare. The lines help Mr. Forbes-Robertson instead of getting in his way ... We get light, freedom, naturalness, credibility, and Shakespeare."

Like Edwin Booth before him, Barrymore defined Hamlet for the American stage. In 1922, he played the Dane in 101 consecutive performances in New York City, breaking Booth's record. Along with a wonderfully resonant voice and precise diction, Barrymore lent an undeniable sex appeal to the role. Critics called his performance "alive with virility and genius," "natural," "untheatrical," and "musical." Barrymore also gave a tour de force as Richard III, in which he did not emphasize the king's physical deformity. "I merely turned my right foot inward," he explained. "I did not try to walk badly. I walked as well as I could."

Throughout the 20th century, Evans shone on the British stage as Viola, Cressida, Portia, Beatrice, and a host of other heroines. The scholar Bernard Grebanier recounts how she made Shakespeare's verse sound conversational, not oratorical. "She was most impressed with his 'wonderful rhythm'—both swift and slow," he writes. "The trick was to leap from emphatic word to emphatic word, and then if you wish to slow your pace, 'you lean on them a bit.'"

Before War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, Welles and his acting company broadcast radio versions of Shakespeare plays, including Macbeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. He had a passion for making Shakespeare relevant to American popular culture, in part by reimagining the plays in contemporary settings. In 1937 the 22-year-old Welles directed Julius Caesar staged in modern dress, with Caesar and Mark Antony as fascist villains and Brutus and Cassius as popular heroes, drawing parallels to Mussolini's Italy.

Great-nephew of Ellen Terry, Gielgud set the gold standard for Hamlet and Prospero according to many critics. He also won accolades for Richard II, Macbeth, Romeo, Lear, Angelo, and Cassius. In the 1950s and '60s, his Ages of Man—a one-man Shakespearean recital drawn from several plays—earned him Tony, Grammy, and Emmy awards. Most known for his mellifluous, expressive voice, he could also capture the physicality of his characters in the smallest detail. "The joke is that people think of me as an intellectual actor," said Gielgud in the New York Times. "Yet I have always trusted almost entirely to observation, emotion, and instinct."

In contrast to the elegance of his contemporary, John Gielgud, Olivier brought a realism and athleticism to his roles, inspired by the swashbuckling movies of Douglas Fairbanks and John Barrymore. Along with his stage work, he directed and starred in three films of Shakespeare—Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955)—which profoundly influenced Shakespearean performance worldwide. Olivier famously disdained method acting; instead he drew on a lifetime of meticulous people-watching to build a character from the outside in. "I usually collect a lot of details," he said, "and find a creature swimming about somewhere in the middle of them."