page_title: Johnston Forbes-Robertson
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Johnston Forbes-Robertson / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Українська: Кадр з фільму Жаль! Бідний Йорик! 1913 року. English: Stills Alas! Poor Yorick! 1913.
context_page_description: Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson was an English actor and theatre manager. He was considered the finest Hamlet of the Victorian era and one of the finest actors of his time, despite his dislike of the job and his lifelong belief that he was temperamentally unsuited to acting.
context_section_description: Born in London, he was the eldest of the eleven children of John Forbes-Robertson, a theatre critic and journalist from Aberdeen, and his wife Frances. One of his sisters, Frances (1866–1956), and three of his brothers, Ian Forbes-Robertson (1859–1936), Norman Forbes-Robertson (1858–1932) and John Kelt (Eric Forbes-Robertson) (1865–1935), also became actors. He was the brother-in-law of famed actress Maxine Elliott, the uncle of Roy Harrod the economist, and he was also the great-uncle of actress Meriel Forbes (granddaughter of his brother Norman), who married actor Ralph Richardson.
  He was educated at Charterhouse. Originally intending to become an artist, he trained for three years at the Royal Academy. He began a theatrical career, out of a desire to be self-supporting, when the dramatist William Gorman Wills, who had seen him in private theatricals, offered him a role in his play Mary Queen of Scots.
  His many performances led him into, among other things, travel to the U.S., and work with Sir Henry Irving. He was hailed as one of the most individual and refined of English actors. He was a personal friend of the Duke of Sutherland and his family and often stayed with them at Trentham Hall; he is known to have recommended to them various writers and musicians in dire need of assistance.
  Forbes-Robertson first came to prominence playing second leads to Henry Irving before making his mark in the role of Hamlet.  One of his early successes was in W. S. Gilbert's Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith. In 1882, he starred with Lottie Venne and Marion Terry in G. W. Godfrey's comedy The Parvenu at the Court Theatre. George Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra for him. Shaw stated:
  
  I wrote Caesar and Cleopatra for Forbes-Robertson, because he is the classic actor of our day, and had a right to require such a service from me … Forbes-Robertson is the only actor I know who can find out the feeling of a speech from its cadence. His art meets the dramatist’s art directly, picking it up for completion and expression without explanations or imitations … Without him Caesar and Cleopatra would not have been written.
  Forbes-Robertson's other notable roles were Romeo, Othello, Leontes in The Winter's Tale, and the leading role in The Passing of the Third Floor Back; performed on Broadway 1908 (filmed in 1916, released 1918). He did not play Hamlet until he was 44 years old, but after his success in the part he continued playing it until 1916, including a surviving silent film (1913). In a theatre review of Forbes-Robertson’s performance in Hamlet published in The Saturday Review (October 2, 1897) George Bernard Shaw wrote:
  
  Nothing half so charming has been seen by this generation. It will bear seeing again and again.  … His intellect is the organ of his passion. His eternal self-criticism is alive and thrilling as it can possible be. … Mr. Forbes-Robertson’s own performance has a continuous charm, interest and variety, which are the result not only of his well-known grace and accomplishment as an actor, but of a genuine delight — the rarest thing on our stage — in Shakespeare’s art, and a natural familiarity with the plane of his imagination.
  Forbes-Robertson was also a talented painter who did a portrait of his mentor Samuel Phelps that currently hangs in the Garrick Club in London. Forbes-Robertson acted in plays with the actress Mary Anderson in the 1880s. He became smitten with her, fell in love with her and asked her hand in marriage. She kindly turned him down though they remained friends. Later he and actress Beatrice Campbell enjoyed a brief affair during the time she starred with him in a series of Shakespearean plays in the mid-1890s.
caption: Hamlet at the grave site
exif: {"Image ExifOffset": "2098", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4360", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3733", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2006:08:24 12:18:16", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2006:08:24 12:18:16", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}