Helen Rous

Helen Rous (1863– 23 March 1934) was a versatile Irish actor who played many times on the London stage. Her parts included supporting roles in works by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

Early life The daughter of Alfred Shaw, she was born in Carlow and was educated at home and at Alexandra College. Kathleen Trousdell Shaw was her younger sister.

Stage career Rous was trained for the stage by Sarah Thorne of the Theatre Royal, Brighton. She made her debut in 1891, with the part of Pauline in The Black Doctor, an Ira Aldridge adaptation from a French original. Parts around 1900 included Mrs Candour in a Haymarket Theatre tour of School for Scandal, and Mrs Crossley Beck in A Wife's Peril, an adaptation of Victorien Sardou's Nos Intimes. In 1901 she played in Lion Hunters with Harry Brodribb Irving and Nina Boucicault, at Terry's Theatre; it was a translation of Édouard Pailleron's satire Le Monde où l'on s'ennuie. There followed more London work, and in 1905–6 she was in a tour with John Hare that took her to the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. The Edwardian role of Lady Bracknell was well-dressed, and Rous was considered "elegant and gracious" in the part. That year she was in Christabel Marshall's suffragist play How The Vote Was Won, as Miss Lizzie Wilkins.

By 1911 Rous was established in grande dame parts: she had appeared "in these particular parts for several years under John Hare and Charles Frohman, and most of the leading London managements." In a successful 1912 curtain raiser The Dusty Path by Wilfred Coleby, for Charles Maude at the Playhouse Theatre, she played Mrs. Posthurst, "whose appearance and manner suggested a well-known member of the Feminist Movement."

In 1917 Rous played Dame Ursula in The Aristocrat by Louis N. Parker, once more with George Alexander in what was his farewell to the theatre. The run was affected by air raids.