page_title: Decima Moore
section_title: Early career and D'Oyly Carte years
hierarchical_section_title: Decima Moore / Life and career / Early career and D'Oyly Carte years
caption_attribution_description: Wallace Brownlow and Decima Moore as Luiz and Casilda in The Gondoliers, 1889
context_page_description: Lilian Decima, Lady Moore-Guggisberg, CBE, better known by her stage name Decima Moore, was an English singer and actress, known for her performances in soprano roles with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and in musical comedies. She was the youngest of ten siblings. Her sister, actress Eva Moore, was the mother of actress Jill Esmond, the first wife of Laurence Olivier.
  Moore made her stage debut starring as Casilda in the Gilbert and Sullivan hit, The Gondoliers, in 1889 at the age of 17 and stayed with the company for two years. She then starred in a variety of West End theatre plays and musical pieces over the next two years, joining the George Edwardes company to create the ingénue role of Rose Brierly in the hit Edwardian musical comedy A Gaiety Girl in 1893. After touring with Edwardes's company in musicals, she returned to England and light opera later playing the role of Scent of Lilies in The Rose of Persia and starring in Florodora and My Lady Molly, among other West End shows.
  In 1905, Moore married Major Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg, moving with him to West Africa.
context_section_description: Moore intended to begin a concert career, but she made her debut at age 17 with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. There she created the leading role of Casilda in The Gondoliers, the last great Gilbert and Sullivan hit, which opened at the Savoy Theatre on 7 December 1889. W. S. Gilbert asked her if she had ever acted. When she replied in the negative, he replied, "So much the better; you'll have less to unlearn!" She related her first-night experience:
  I had to make my first entrance in a gondola, with my back to the audience; and when I turned round to get out of it and faced the house my feelings were such that I shall never forget. I had only been to about three theatres in my life, and, of course, had never seen an audience in evening dress from the stage. When I did see that audience... I felt a "catch" in the chest as if I had fallen into an ice-cold bath and it had taken away all my breath. I stuck my finger nails into my palms and said, "This won't do!" and walked down the stage, trying to remember all I had been told to do and not to do. I got through the evening in a kind of dream, wept all the way home in the hansom, convinced I had been a failure.
  In fact, Moore earned good reviews.  The Times wrote that she "has a delightfully fresh voice... she sings with very good taste and gives distinct promise of becoming a very acceptable actress; her appearance is extremely taking, and on the whole, a more successful début has not recently taken place". Her next role was Polly in Captain Billy (1891), the companion piece to The Nautch Girl. Her older sister, Jessie Moore, who sang with one of D'Oyly Carte's touring companies, replaced Decima in Captain Billy in November 1891.
  Moore left the Savoy when her commitment expired, starring in several West End Theatre pieces, including Miss Decima by Edmond Audran and F. C. Burnand (replacement cast, 1891–92), A Pantomime Rehearsal by Cecil Clay (1892 at the Royal Court Theatre), The Maelstrom (1892), Ophelia in Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1892), The Wedding Eve (1892 at the Trafalgar Theatre), and the title role in a revival of B. C. Stephenson and Alfred Cellier's hit, Dorothy (1892–93). In 1893, Moore returned to the D'Oyly Carte organisation to create the role of Bab in the unsuccessful Jane Annie, with a libretto by J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle and music by Ernest Ford.
  Moore then left D'Oyly Carte again to appear in La fille de Madame Angot at the Criterion Theatre. Next, she created the ingénue role of Rose Brierly in A Gaiety Girl (1893–94), one of George Edwardes's hit musical comedies. In 1894, Edwardes sent Moore and the company to New York and then on tour in the U.S. While in Richmond, New York in February 1896, still touring in A Gaiety Girl, Moore married a fellow cast member, Cecil Ainslie Walker-Leigh, an Anglo-Irish career officer in the British Army who served in the Boer War and World War I and retired with the rank of Colonel. The company was then sent to Australia, where she starred as Bessie Brent in the musical comedy, The Shop Girl, and later played the Prima Donna of the Ambiguity Theatre in In Town. To please her mother, they had a church wedding. They had a son in 1898, William Esmond Ormond Walker-Leigh, who eventually had a Navy career, but Moore divorced her husband in 1901, at a time when divorce was still rare and considered dishonourable.
caption: as Casilda in The Gondoliers
exif: {}