Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
Alan Jay Lerner was an American lyricist and librettist. In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, and later Burton Lane, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre both for the stage and on film. Lerner won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical fiction and gothic horror novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The novel-length version was published in April 1891.
Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.
John Augustin Daly was one of the most influential men in American theatre during his lifetime. Drama critic, theatre manager, playwright, and adapter, he became the first recognized stage director in America. He exercised fierce and tyrannical control over all aspects of his productions. His rules of conduct for actors and actresses imposed heavy fines for late appearances and forgotten lines and earned him the title "the autocrat of the stage." He formed a permanent company in New York and opened Daly's Theatre in New York in 1879, and a second one in London in 1893.
Lawrence Patrick Barrett was an American stage actor.
William Archer was a Scottish author, theatre critic, and English spelling reformer based, for most of his career, in London. He was an early advocate of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and a friend and advocate of George Bernard Shaw.
Maude Ewing Adams Kiskadden, known professionally as Maude Adams, was an American actress and stage designer who achieved her greatest success as the character Peter Pan, first playing the role in the 1905 Broadway production of Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. Adams' personality appealed to a large audience and helped her become the most successful and highest-paid performer of her day, with a yearly income of more than $1 million during her peak.
Sir Walter Besant was an English novelist and historian. William Henry Besant was his brother, and another brother, Frank, was the husband of Annie Besant.
Clement William Scott was an influential English theatre critic for The Daily Telegraph and other journals, and a playwright, lyricist, translator and travel writer, in the final decades of the 19th century. His style of criticism, acerbic, flowery and carried out on the first night of productions, set the standard for theatre reviewers through to today.
Sir Francis Cowley Burnand, usually known as F. C. Burnand, was an English comic writer and prolific playwright, best known today as the librettist of Arthur Sullivan's opera Cox and Box.
Marjorie Burnet Rambeau was an American film and stage actress. She began her stage career at age 12, and appeared in several silent films before debuting in her first sound film, Her Man (1930). She was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in Primrose Path (1940) and Torch Song (1953), and received the 1955 National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles in A Man Called Peter and The View from Pompey's Head.
Paul Dale Smith is a writer and playwright from Leicester, England but currently living and working in Greater Manchester. He writes under the name Dale Smith, and has had previous works published and performed under the names Paul Smith and Paul D. Smith.
Henry Theophilus Finck was an American music critic and author. Among "the most prolific and influential critics of his day", he was chief classical music critic of both the New York Evening Post and The Nation from 1881 to 1924. He championed Romantic music, promoting composers such as Liszt, Wagner, Grieg and MacDowell. Along with his contemporaries Richard Aldrich, W.J. Henderson, James Huneker and Henry Edward Krehbiel, Finck is considered part of the 'Old Guard', a group of leading New York–based music critics who first established a uniquely American school of criticism.
Edward Solomon was an English composer, conductor, orchestrator and pianist. He died at age 39 by which time he had written dozens of works produced for the stage, including several for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, including The Nautch Girl (1891). Early in his career, he was a frequent collaborator of Henry Pottinger Stephens. He had a bigamous marriage with Lillian Russell in the 1880s.
William Henry Redfield was an American actor and author who appeared in many theatrical, film, radio, and television roles.
John Peter Wearing is an Anglo-American theatre historian and professor, who has written numerous books and articles about nineteenth and twentieth-century drama and theatre, including The Shakespeare Diaries: A Fictional Autobiography, published in 2007. He has also written and edited well-received books on George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Wing Pinero, extensive reference series on the London theatre from 1890 to 1980, and theatrical biographies, among other subjects. As a professor of English literature, Wearing has specialised in Shakespeare and modern drama.
Walter Herries Pollock was an English writer, poet, lecturer and journalist. He is best known as editor of the Saturday Review, a position he held from 1884 to 1894, but also had published various miscellaneous writings that included novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translated works between 1877 and 1920. He was also, at one time, considered one of the best amateur fencers in Great Britain.
Henry Ingott Woodruff was an American stage and silent film actor. He's remembered for starring in the original Broadway play Brown of Harvard in 1905.
Ernest E. Lawford (1870–1940) was an English stage and film actor.
