Actor
He was also famous for playing Falstaff. Contemporary critics acclaimed that in this role Kemble achieved the "optimum balance between comedy and gravity.". After his performance in London at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1802, the Morning Chronicle wrote that "It is to be regretted that his associations in the country prevent him from accepting a permanent engagement in London." Kemble would return to play Falstaff in London at Covent Garden (1806) and the Drury Lane (1816), for which he received great acclaim. After Kemble's death, The Edinburgh literary journal wrote, " Kemble was perhaps the best Sir John Falstaff which the British stage ever saw."
Kemble also played Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and many other roles.
Writer for The London Magazine John Taylor wrote, "Mr. Stephen Kemble was an actor of considerable merit." Taylor writes about Kemble's commitment to address injustice through theatre: "All characters of an open, blunt nature, and requiring a vehement expression of justice and integrity, particularly those exemplifying an honest indignation against vice, he delivered in so forcible a manner, as to show. obviously that he was developing his own feelings and character. This manner was very successfully displayed in his representation of the Governor,Sir Christopher Curry, in the opera of Inkle and Yarico."
Taylor writes of Kemble's reputation in the provincial theatre circuit: "Stephen Kemble, who was an accurate observer of human life, and an able delineater of character and manners, was so intelligent and humorous a companion, that he was received with respect into the best company in the several provincial towns, which he occasionally visited in the exercise of his profession."
Read more about this topic: Stephen Kemble
Famous quotes containing the word actor:
“While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Mr. [John] Barrymore’s smile was the smile of an actor who hates actors, and who knows that he is going to kill two or three before the play is over. I am not an actor-killer, but I like my Hamlets to dislike actors, if you know what I mean, and I think you don’t.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“An actor rides in a bus or railroad train; he sees a movement and applies it to a new role. A woman in agony of spirit might turn her head just so; a man in deep humiliation probably would wring his hands in such a way. From straws like these, drawn from completely different sources, the fabric of a character may be built. The whole garment in which the actor hides himself is made of small externals of observation fitted to his conception of a role.”
—Eleanor Robson Belmont (1878–1979)