Cecil Raleigh

Biography

Cecil Raleigh—born Cecil Rowlands in England on 27 January 1856—first trod the boards as a song-and-dance man before ink proved mightier than greasepaint. Abandoning his medical-family script, he swapped the family name for the swagger of “Raleigh” and polished his talents in musical-comedy footlights until the lure of the quill won out. Alone or shoulder-to-shoulder with scene-stealers such as Henry Hamilton, Augustus Harris and Seymour Hicks, he stitched together the grand, gasp-laden melodramas that kept West-End curtains rising and falling at the hinge of two centuries. Between matrimonial acts—his first to novelist Effie Adelaide Rowlands ended in divorce, his second to actress Saba Raleigh endured—he spun out thrillers that flickered onto silent screens long after their final bows. Chief among them: the 1909 barn-stormer The Whip (filmed in 1928), a co-creation with Hamilton that cracked its way from stage to celluloid. Raleigh’s own curtain fell in London on 10 November 1914, leaving a legacy of swirling capes, racing hearts and titles that refused to dim when the houselights rose.