the play at the Comedy Theatre; it was performed 430 times in succession, and he revived it on many subsequent occasions. On 3 November 1903 Waller opened in this play at the Imperial Theatre, which he continued to manage until May 1906. He then removed to the Lyric Theatre, where he remained, with varying success, until July 1910. He made several notable productions during his period of management, especially Miss Elizabeth's Prisoner, Brigadier Gerard, Robin Hood, A White Man, and The Fires of Fate. He also revived Othello and Romeo and Juliet, but these ventures were unsuccessful. In September 1911 Waller visited the United States for the first time, and in October achieved success in a production in New York of The Garden of Allah. In May 1913 he went to Australia, where he remained for twelve months, and on his return to England reappeared on the London stage. In June 1915 he appeared at Wyndham's Theatre as John Leighton in Gamblers All by May Martindale, and while appearing in this play at Nottingham in the following October caught a chill and died there of double pneumonia on 1 November. He was buried in Kensal Green cemetery.
Waller was an actor of great individuality. His pleasing voice and fine presence fascinated popular audiences. No actor of his time could compare with him in such parts as D'Artagnan, Hotspur, or Henry V. But his acting appealed less to the intellect than to the eye and ear. His energy was remarkable, and during his thirty-two years' career he played nearly two hundred parts on the London stage without missing a performance. He was a great favourite with King Edward VII.
Waller married in 1883 Florence (died 1912), eldest daughter of Horatio Brandon, solicitor. First as Florence West, and subsequently under her married name, she was for many years a popular actress. Waller was survived by a son and a daughter, both of whom appeared on the stage.
A painting of Waller as ‘Beaucaire’, by the Hon. John Collier, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1903.
[The Times, Daily Telegraph, Standard, 4 November 1915; Clement W. Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and To-Day, 1899; Who's Who in the Theatre; private information; personal knowledge.]
WARD, MARY AUGUSTA (1851–1920), better known as Mrs. Humphry Ward, novelist and social worker, was the daughter of Thomas Arnold [q.v.], by his wife, Julia, daughter of William Sorell, of Hobart Town, Tasmania. Her father was the second son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby [q.v.]. She was born at Hobart Town 11 June 1851, and was the eldest of a family of eight children. At the time of her birth her father held an appointment as inspector of schools in the public education service of Tasmania, which he relinquished in 1856 on being received into the Church of Rome. He brought his family to England in the same year, and after a period of work in Roman Catholic educational establishments at Dublin and Birmingham, returned to the Church of England in 1865 and settled in Oxford. His daughter Mary, who had spent the interval at private boarding schools, came to live at home in the summer of 1867, and began, as she herself considered, her real education. She worked hard at music and early Spanish literature, and delighted in the stimulating society of the university. In 1872 she married Thomas Humphry Ward, fellow and tutor of Brasenose College, son of the Rev. Henry Ward, vicar of St. Barnabas, King Square, Holloway.
The movement for the higher education of women began in Oxford in the years succeeding Mary Ward's marriage, and in 1879 she acted as the first secretary of Somerville College. She was at that time engaged on an ambitious piece of historical work, the writing of the lives of early Spanish ecclesiastics for the Dictionary of Christian Biography. In 1881 her environment was changed by removal to London, but her literary activities were not interrupted. Mr. Humphry Ward had joined the staff of The Times, and his wife also became a contributor to that paper as well as to various reviews. In spite of writer's cramp, which now first attacked her and continued to hamper her for the rest of her life, she wrote her first novel, Miss Bretherton, in 1884, and translated Henri Frederic Amiel's Journal Intime in the same year.
Mrs. Ward had an hereditary interest in religious problems, which had been fostered by her life in Oxford. While still a young woman she arrived at the conclusion that Christianity could be revitalized by discarding its miraculous element and emphasizing its social mission, and to this she held firmly all her life. She embodied her views in her best-known novel, Robert Elsmere (1888), which at once excited public interest, and was the subject of elaborate comment by Mr. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century. The sales of the first three editions in the United Kingdom amounted to 70,500, and pirated editions of the book had a great success in America.
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