Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Power, Tyrone
POWER, TYRONE (1797–1841), Irish comedian, whose full name was William Grattan Tyrone Power, was born near Kilmacthomas, co. Waterford, on 2 Nov. 1797. His father was a member of a well-to-do Waterford family, and died in America before Tyrone was a year old. His mother Marie, daughter of a Colonel Maxwell, who fell in the American war of independence, settled, on her husband's death, in Cardiff, where she had a distant relative named Bird, a printer and bookseller. On the voyage from Dublin she and her son were wrecked off the Welsh coast, and narrowly escaped drowning. Power may have served an apprenticeship to Bird's printing business in Cardiff. Bird was printer to the local theatre, and seems to have introduced Power to the company of strolling players which, to the great grief of his mother, he joined in his fourteenth year. He was handsome and well made, and creditably filled the rôle of ‘a walking gentleman.’ In 1815 he visited Newport, Isle of Wight, and became engaged to Miss Gilbert, whom he married in 1817, at the age of nineteen, his wife being a year younger. After appearing in various minor characters he undertook, in 1818, at Margate, the part of a comic Irishman, Looney Mactwoler, in the ‘Review.’ His first attempt in the part, in which he was destined to make a great reputation, was a complete failure. Want of success as an actor led him at the end of the year, when his wife succeeded to a small fortune, to quit the stage. He spent twelve months ineffectively in South Africa, but returned to England and the stage in 1821. He obtained small engagements in the London theatres, and in 1824 made a second and somewhat successful attempt in Irish farce as Larry Hoolagan, a drunken scheming servant, in the ‘Irish Valet.’ In 1826, while filling small rôles at Covent Garden, his opportunity came. Charles Connor [q. v.], the leading Irish comedian on the London stage, died suddenly of apoplexy in St. James's Park on 7 Oct. 1826. At the time he was fulfilling an engagement at Covent Garden. Power was alloted Connor's parts as Serjeant Milligan in ‘Returned Killed,’ and O'Shaughnessy in the ‘One Hundred Pound Note.’ His success was immediate. Henceforth he confined himself to the delineation of Irish character, in which he is said by contemporary critics to have been superior to Connor, and at least the equal of John Henry Johnstone [q. v.] He appeared at the Haymarket, Adelphi, and Covent Garden theatres in London, fulfilling long engagements at 100l. and 120l. a week, and he paid annual visits to the Theatre Royal, Dublin, where he was always received with boundless enthusiasm. Between 1833 and 1835 he made a tour in America, appearing in the principal towns and cities, and repeated the visit in 1837 and 1838.
Power's last appearance on the London stage was at the Haymarket on Saturday evening, 1 Aug. 1840, when he filled the rôles of Captain O'Cutter in the ‘Jealous Wife;’ Sir Patrick O'Plenipo, A.D.C., in the ‘Irish Ambassador;’ and Tim More (a travelling tailor) in the ‘Irish Lion.’ He was announced to open the Haymarket season on Easter Monday, 12 April 1841, in his own farce, ‘Born to Good Luck, or the Irishman's Fortune.’
Meanwhile he paid a fourth visit to America, in 1840, in order to look after some property he had purchased in Texas, and 3,000l. he had invested in the United States Bank, which had stopped payment. On 11 March 1841 he left New York on the return voyage in the President, the largest steamer then afloat. There were 123 persons on board. The steamer was accompanied by the packet ship Orpheus, also bound for Liverpool. On the night of 12 March a tempest arose and raged during the whole of Saturday the 13th. Before the break of dawn on Sunday the 14th the President disappeared, and no vestige of her was afterwards recovered. Power was forty-four years old at the date of the disaster. He left a widow and four sons and three daughters. His eldest son, Sir William Tyrone Power, K.C.B., some time agent-general for New Zealand and author of various books of travel, still survives. His second son, Maurice, went on the stage, and died suddenly in 1849.
Tyrone Power was about five feet eight inches in height; his form was light and agile, with a very animated and expressive face, light complexion, blue eyes, and brown hair. He was best in representations of blundering, good-natured, and eccentric Irish characters; but his exuberant, rollicking humour, and his inexhaustible good spirits he infused into every comedy and farce, however indifferent, in which he acted.
On his return to London, after his first tour in America in 1836, he published ‘Impressions of America,’ in two volumes. He had previously published three romances—‘The Lost Heir’ (1830), ‘The Gipsy of the Abruzzo’ (1831), and ‘The King's Secret’ (1831). He also wrote the Irish farces, ‘Born to Good Luck, or the Irishman's Fortune;’ ‘How to pay the Rent;’ ‘O'Flannigan and the Fairies;’ ‘Paddy Carey, the Boy of Clogheen;’ the Irish drama ‘St. Patrick's Eve, or the Orders of the Day;’ and a comedy entitled ‘Married Lovers,’ all of which he produced himself.
[In Webb's and other notices of Power he has been confused with a contemporary actor, Thomas Powell, who, born at Swansea and there brought up as a compositor, achieved some success in his lifetime in the delineation of Irish character, and assumed the name of Tyrone Power. The real facts of the genuine Tyrone Power's Irish origin and early life were set out in a full biography of him by his friend J. W. Calcraft, manager of the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in the Dublin University Magazine for 1852 (vol. xl.). See also B. N. Webster's Acting National Drama, vol. ii.; Thomas Marshall's Lives of the most celebrated Actors and Actresses.]