 As an artist Weedon Grossmith exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the Grosvenor Gallery. He also contributed illustrations to Punch and the prestigious Art Journal. He was nevertheless dissatisfied with his financial prospects as an artist, and by 1885 was pursuing an alternative career as an actor. He continued his career on the stage with considerable success until 1918, making his name playing roles he described as "cowards, cads and snobs", and as browbeaten small men under the thumb of authority. He wrote several plays, of which The Night of the Party (1901) was his most successful, and from 1894 was engaged in the management of two West End theatres. He died in 1919. The literary scholar Peter Morton, who published an annotated edition of the Diary in 2009, suggests that many of the events depicted in it were drawn from the brothers' own home experiences, and that Weedon, "something of a scapegrace compared with his perfectionist brother", was the model for Lupin.
