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Edith (Edy) Craig
(December 9, 1869 - March 27, 1947) U.K.

Edith Craig

Actress and stage producer

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Edith Ailsa Geraldine Craig, daughter of Ellen Terry and Edward William Godwin was born at Gusterwoods Common, Hertfordshire. Shortly after her birth, her parents moved at Harpenden, built by Godwin, a distinguished architect. Here, Edy, as she was known from infancy, lived until 1874.

Edy had many different homes in or near London after that date, among them a cottage at Hampton Court, a house in Longridge Road, and another in Barkston Gardens. Edy was educated at a co-educational school in Earl's Court, kept by Mrs. Cole, and later at Dixton Manor near Winchcombe in Gloucestershire by Mrs. Cole's sister, Mrs. Malleson, one of the pioneers of Women's Suffrage and kindred reforms.

Edy made her first appearance on the stage in 1878 during the run of Olivia at the Court Theatre, but her future career was not then decided. After leaving school, she went to the Royal Academy of Music, and thence to Berlin to be trained as a pianist. The doubtful question that this was her vocation was settled by her life-long enemy, chronic rheumatism, and she returned to England and the stage, becoming a regular member of the Lyceum company in 1890.

She played a great number of small parts in Irving's productions during the next ten years, and gained further experience as an actress on tours with Mrs. Brown-Potter, and the Independent Theatre (1897).

Between 1911 and 1921 she produced 150 plays for the Pioneer Players, Sunday coterie theatre she had founded. After its demise, she found scope for her talents in Little Theatre movement, producing plays at York, Leeds, Letchworth and Hampstead. In 1929, the year after Ellen Terry's death, she converted the Elizabethan barn adjacent to Ellen Terry's house at Smallhythe into a theatre.

There, Eddy produced plays at intervals during the summer months for the Barn Theater Society she had organized on the lines of the Pioneer Players. Her other activities comprised the production of pageants, a few appearances in film, and a scholarly collection of scrapbooks and notebooks, which may serve as valuable data for some future historian of the theatre. She died unexpectly at Priest's House.

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