Evelyn Millard

Evelyn Mary Millard (18 September 1869 – 9 March 1941) was an English Shakespearean actress, actor-manager and "stage beauty" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perhaps best known for creating the role of Cecily Cardew in the 1895 premiere of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Early life and career

Millard was born in Kensington in London in 1869, one of three daughters of John Millard (1838 –1900), a teacher of elocution at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, and his wife, Emily (née Cooke) (1848–1902). Evelyn Millard studied at the Female School of Art in Bloomsbury. She made her first stage appearance in 1891 in a "walk-on" role in Henry Arthur Jones' play The Dancing Girl at the Haymarket Theatre in London. She trained as an actress under Sarah Thorne at her School of Acting based at the Theatre Royal in Margate, where she learnt "voice production, gesture and mime, dialects and accents, make-up, the portrayal of characters, the value of pace and the value of pauses". For Thorne she played Julia in The Hunchback, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. She then joined Thomas Thorne's company, and toured in the plays Joseph's Sweetheart, Miss Tomboy, Sophia and Money.

For the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman, she played Lady Ursula in The Adventure of Lady Ursula at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1898, the title role in Jerome K. Jerome's Miss Hobbs, both of which ran for over 200 performances, and Cho-Cho-San in the London premiere of David Belasco's play Madame Butterfly, which opened on 28 April 1900 at the Duke of York's Theatre and which ran for sixty-eight performances. The cast included Allan Aynesworth, Claude Gillingwater and J. C. Buckstone. This production was seen by the composer Giacomo Puccini, who is said to have based his opera Madama Butterfly on it. Their daughter Ursula Helen Coulter (1901–1991) was named after the character Millard was playing in The Adventure of Lady Ursula when she met Coulter in 1898. In March 1902 Millard returned to the stage at the St James's Theatre to play Francesca in Paolo and Francesca. She also played Edith Dombey in Dombey and Son and Agnes in David Copperfield, among others. Millard reprised the role of Cho-Cho-San in Madame Butterfly at the Palace Theatre of Varieties in London in 1911.

Millard's last major role was as Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield at His Majesty's Theatre in December 1914. Her last known role was a brief appearance as Calpurnia in Julius Caesar during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1916.

Following her retirement Millard lived in Abingdon Court in Kensington where she died on 9 March 1941 aged 70.

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