Lillah McCarthy

Who was Lillah McCarthy?

Lillah McCarthy was an English actress and theatrical manager.

McCarthy was born in Cheltenham. She studied elocution under Hermann Vezin and Emil Behnke, and made her first appearance on the stage in 1895. She joined Wilson Barrett at the Lyric, London, in 1896-97, and after touring in Australia she became leading lady with him in 1900, playing in Quo Vadis?, The Sign of the Cross, Knowles's Virginius, Hamlet, and Othello. She then accompanied Barrett to South Africa and Australia. In 1904 she played with Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty's Theatre in the adaptation Agatha by Mrs Humphrey Ward and Louis N. Parker from her 1903 novel, Robert Buchanan's A Man's Shadow, and Julius Cæsar. Subsequently she appeared in Man and Superman; Maurice Hewlett's Pan and the Young Shepherd; Arms and the Man; What Every Woman Knows; John Galsworthy's Strife; Maugham's Grace; John Masefield's The Tragedy of Nan; Twelfth Night.

She married Harley Granville-Barker in 1906, assumed the management of the Little Theatre, John Adam Street London, in 1911, and was associated with her husband in the management of the Savoy in 1912. In 1915 she played with her husband's company at Wallack's Theatre in New York City in Androcles and the Lion, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Anatole France's The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, and The Doctor's Dilemma, and at various colleges in outdoor performances of Euripedes' The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris.