Violet Vanbrugh

Violet Augusta Mary Bourchier, née Barnes (11 June 1867 – 11 November 1942), known professionally as Violet Vanbrugh, was an English actress with a career that spanned more than fifty years.

Vanbrugh was from a family with theatrical connections. The actress Irene Vanbrugh was one of her younger sisters and a brother, Kenneth Barnes, became principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

She made her professional debut in an 1886 burlesque. In the same year she had her first West End speaking role and then joined a repertory company in Margate playing leading roles in four of Shakespeare's plays among others. She next played in J. L. Toole's company for two years. In 1889 she joined the Kendals at the Court Theatre and on tour in the US. Two years later, back in London, she joined Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in their Shakespeare company at the Lyceum Theatre. In 1893, she appeared opposite her future husband Arthur Bourchier at Daly's Theatre and soon became his leading lady at the Royalty Theatre and later at the Garrick Theatre, where Bourchier was lessee for the first six years of the 20th century.

Vanbrugh returned to Shakespearean roles in 1906 at Stratford upon Avon, where she played Lady Macbeth to her husband's Macbeth, and in 1910 they starred together in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's London production of Henry VIII. They divorced in 1917, after which Vanbrugh continued acting on stage until 1937 (making some further appearances until 1940) and appeared in films in the 1930s. In her fiftieth season on stage she starred in The Merry Wives of Windsor with her sister in London, and during the Blitz, the two entertained at matinees. She died at her home in London in 1942 at the age of 75.

Vanbrugh was born in Exeter, in south-west England, on 11 June 1867, the eldest of six children of the Rev Reginald Henry Barnes, Prebendary of Exeter Cathedral and Vicar of Heavitree, and his wife, Frances Mary Emily, née Nation. Her mother was an amateur actress, praised by the stage star Ellen Terry, and there were other theatrical antecedents on the maternal side: W. H. C. Nation, who managed theatres in London, was Violet's uncle and her great-grandfather introduced Edmund Kean to the London stage. Two of her siblings later pursued theatrical careers – the actress Irene Vanbrugh and the principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Kenneth Barnes. She was educated in Exeter, France and Germany.

Although her father was at first dismayed by her wish to go on the stage, he eventually gave his consent. She moved to London with £50 (equivalent to £5,141 in 2023), a small legacy she had received, but after three months the money was running out and she had failed to find a theatrical engagement. She was helped by Ellen Terry, a family friend, who invited her to stay at her Chelsea house, and introduced her to the actor-manager J. L. Toole. He gave Violet her first chance, at his theatre in the West End, in February 1886 in F. C. Burnand's burlesque Faust and Loose as one of what Terry called "an absurd chorus … dressed in tight black satin coats, who besides dancing and singing had lines in unison, such as 'No, no!' 'We will!'" At Terry's suggestion, Violet took the stage name of Vanbrugh.

Irene Vanbrugh later credited her elder sister with making both their acting careers possible: "Violet, with both hands outstretched, made the opening wide enough to get through herself and when my time came the door was still ajar." Violet's first speaking role was Ellen, in The Little Pilgrim, a dramatisation of a Ouida story, at the Criterion Theatre.

In 1886 Vanbrugh joined Sarah Thorne's theatre company at the Theatre Royal Margate, which gave her – and later her younger sister – what a biographer describes as "an invaluable training, learning a new part every week". Thorne usually charged a fee to take pupils into her company, but Violet, and then Irene, showed such promise they were accepted free of charge. Violet was playing leading roles by the time Irene arrived at Margate two years after her, in August 1888. Irene recalled, "We played every kind of play there; comedy, farce, and drama of the deepest dye; while at Christmas there came the pantomime so that the Juliet of a week ago might be the Prince Paragon of the Yule-tide extravaganza."