Marie Tempest
actress
- Birth name:
- Marie Susan Etherington
- Born:
- 1862-07-15, London, England, UK
- Died:
- 1942-10-15, London, England, UK
- Professions:
- actress
Biography
London’s East End greeted Marie Tempest with summer fireworks on 15 July 1862, and the city never stopped applauding. From toy-theatre sketches in shabby halls to West-End triumphs, she spun every role—Nell Gwyn one night, a mischievous Mrs. Plum the next—into gold-dust. Cameras found her twice: in 1900 for the silent flirtation English Nell, and again in 1915 when Mrs. Plum’s Pudding leapt from stove to screen. Twenty-three years later, aged but unbroken, she strode through Yellow Sands, salt-air wit still crackling. Offstage she collected surnames the way others saved playbills—first Alfred E. Izard, then Cosmo Gordon Lennox, finally W. Graham Brown—yet the spotlight never dimmed. On 15 October 1942 London dimmed its own lights; Tempest took her final bow in the same streets that once lifted her up, leaving the city’s curtains forever twitching for an encore.
