KEELEY, MARY ANNE (18o61899)

This article appears in Volume V15, Page 712 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: JUN-KHA

KEELEY, MARY ANNE (18o61899) , English actress, was born at Ipswich on the 22nd of November 1805 or 18o6. Her maiden name was Goward, her father being a brazier and tinman. After some experience in the provinces, she first appeared on the stage in London on the 2nd of July 1825, in the opera Rosina. It was not long before she gave up " singing parts " in favour of the drama proper, where her powers of character-acting could have

scope

SCOPE (through Ital. scopo, aim, purpose, intent, from Gr. o'KOaos, mark to shoot at, aim, o ic07reiv, to see, whence the termination in telescope, microscope, &c.)

. In June 1829 she married Robert Keeley (17931869), an admirable comedian, with whom she had often appeared. Between 1832 and 1842 they acted at Covent

Garden

GARDEN (from O. Fr. garden, mod. Fr. jardin; this, like our words " garth," a paddock attached to a building, and " yard," comes from a Teutonic word for an enclosure which appears in Gothic as gards and O. H. Ger. gart, cf. Dutch gaarde and Ger. .garten)

, at the Adelphi with Buckstone, at the Olympic with Charles Mathews, and at Drury Lane with Macready. In 1836 they visited America. In 1838 she made her first

great

GREAT

success as Nydia, the blind girl, in a dramatized version of Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, and followed this with an equally striking impersonation of Smike in Nicholas Nickleby. In 1839 came her decisive

triumph

TRIUMPH (triumphus)

with her picturesque and spirited acting as the hero of a play founded upon Harrison

Ainsworth

's Jack Sheppard. So dangerous was considered the popularity of the play, with its glorification of the prison-breaking felon, that the lord chamber-lain ultimately forbade the performance of any piece upon the subject. It is perhaps mainly as Jack Sheppard that Mrs Keeley lived in the memory of playgoers, despite her long subsequent career in plays more worthy of her remarkable gifts. Under Macready's management she played Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, and Audrey in As You Like It. She managed the Lyceum with her husband from 1844 to 1847; acted with

Webster

and

Kean

KEAN, EDMUND (1787–1833)

at the Haymarket; returned for five years to the Adelphi; and made her last regular public

appearance

APPEARANCE (from Lat. apparere, to appear)

at the Lyceum in 1859. A public reception was given her at this theatre on her 9oth birthday. She died on the 12th of

March

1899.
See Walter Goodman, The Keeleys on the Stage and off (London, 1895).

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