Youth and Acting Career
A member of the famous Kemble theatrical family, Fanny was the oldest daughter of the actor Charles Kemble and Marie Therese De Camp. She was a niece of the noted tragedienne Sarah Siddons and of the famous actor John Philip Kemble. Her younger sister was the opera singer Adelaide Kemble. Fanny was born in London and educated chiefly in France.
On 26 October 1829, Fanny Kemble at age 20 first appeared on the stage as Juliet William Shakespeare's drama Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden Theatre. Her attractive personality at once made her a great favorite, and her popularity enabled her father to recoup his losses as a manager. She played all the principal women's roles of the time, notably Shakespeare's Portia (Merchant of Venice) and Beatrice (Much Ado about Nothing), and Lady Teazle in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal. Perhaps her greatest role, although not as a lead, was that of Julia in James Sheridan Knowles' The Hunchback; He wrote it especially for her.
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Famous quotes containing the words youth and, youth, acting and/or career:
“Can delight
Chained in night
The virgins of youth and morning bear?”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
““I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundred pound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get ‘em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among ‘em as nothing should equal it!””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“I could live without acting.... Acting is a gift I’ve received. And I’m grateful for it and I enjoy it. But it’s not the main point of my life. It never was.”
—Jeanne Moreau (b. 1928)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
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