page_title: George Grossmith
section_title: D'Oyly Carte years
hierarchical_section_title: George Grossmith / Life and career / D'Oyly Carte years
caption_attribution_description: English: Caricature of George Grossmith. Caption read "The Pinafore".
context_page_description: George Grossmith was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, some 600 songs and piano pieces, three books and both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines.
  Grossmith created a series of nine characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter, in H.M.S. Pinafore, the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance and Ko-Ko in The Mikado. He also wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel The Diary of a Nobody.
  Grossmith was also famous in his day for performing his own comic piano sketches and songs, both before and after his Gilbert and Sullivan days, becoming the most popular British solo performer of the 1890s. Some of his comic songs endure today, including "See Me Dance the Polka". He continued to perform into the first decade of the 20th century. His son, George Grossmith Jr., became an actor, playwright and producer of Edwardian musical comedies.
context_section_description: Grossmith had appeared in charity performances of Trial by Jury, where both Sullivan and Gilbert had seen him (indeed, Gilbert had directed one such performance, in which Grossmith played the judge), and Gilbert had earlier commented favourably on his performance in Tom Robertson's Society at the Gallery of Illustration. Sullivan mentioned to Arthur Cecil, the leading tenor from the Gallery of Illustration, that he was looking for someone to play the comic title role in his new comic opera, The Sorcerer.  Cecil reminded Sullivan about Grossmith, and Sullivan seized on the idea. After singing for Sullivan, upon meeting Gilbert, Grossmith wondered aloud if the role shouldn't be played by "a fine man with a fine voice".  Gilbert replied, "That is exactly what we don't want." Although Grossmith had reservations about cancelling his touring engagements and going into the "wicked" professional theatre (a move that might lose him church and other engagements in the future), and Richard D'Oyly Carte's backers objected to casting a sketch comedian in the central role of a comic opera, Grossmith was hired.
  Grossmith was a hit as the tradesmanlike John Wellington Wells, the title role in The Sorcerer, and became a regular member of Richard D'Oyly Carte's company.  He created all nine of the lead comic baritone roles in Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy Operas in London from 1877 to 1889, including the pompous First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Joseph Porter, in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878); Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance, who is an expert at everything except "military knowledge" (1880); the aesthetic poet, Reginald Bunthorne in Patience (1881); the love-lonely Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe (1882); the sarcastic cripple, King Gama, in Princess Ida (1884); Ko-Ko the cheap tailor, elevated to the post of Lord High Executioner, in The Mikado (1885); the accursed Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore (1887); and the pathetic jester, Jack Point, in The Yeomen of the Guard (1888). On 29 January 1887, one week after the opening night of Ruddigore, Grossmith fell dangerously ill. However, by 13 February, his physicians pronounced him convalescent, and he resumed the role of Robin by 18 February. During Grossmith's absence, his understudy Henry Lytton, who would later become the principal comedian of the company, had the opportunity to perform the role in Grossmith's place.
  Years later, Grossmith's obituary in The Times noted the comedian's "nimbleness, his diverting tricks, his still more diverting dignity—the dignity of a man of few inches high or round—and his incomparable power of rapid speech and singing."  The Daily Telegraph wrote of his Jack Point: "Whether giving expression to poor Jack’s professional wit, or hiding a sorry heart behind light words... Mr Grossmith was master of the part he assumed." In 1883, The Times, reviewing a matinee performance of Iolanthe, wrote: "Mr. Grossmith's impersonation of the Lord Chancellor has ... become an exquisitely refined satire." On the other hand, his sketch comedy background had trained Grossmith to improvise comic business.  Gilbert and the actor had an exchange during rehearsals for The Mikado about an improvised moment in which Jessie Bond pushed Grossmith, as they kneeled before the Mikado, and he rolled completely over. Gilbert requested that they cut out the gag, and Grossmith replied: "but I get an enormous laugh by it". Gilbert replied "So you would if you sat on a pork-pie."
  The actor, jittery on opening nights, is depicted both on and off stage in the biographical film, Topsy Turvy.  Hesketh Pearson wrote in 1935 that Grossmith injected himself with drugs to calm his nerves. and in the film he is shown injecting himself on the opening night of The Mikado. In his diary, Arthur Sullivan wrote afterwards, "All went very well except Grossmith, whose nervousness nearly upset the piece". Grossmith spoke self-deprecatingly about his own vocal prowess (Sullivan and others disagreed):
  Of course, I haven't any voice to speak of, but I have a great register, and Sullivan used to amuse himself by ma
caption: Vanity Fair print, 1888
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