“This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for the women that stand beside me - Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox - and it's for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.” Halle Berry, Oscar acceptance speech, 2002 / When Halle Berry won the Best Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award for Monster's Ball (2001), she dedicated her Oscar to the African American actresses who had come before her, whose struggles, activism and perseverance had helped to pave the way for her own success. Berry's award (the first given to a leading black woman in the seventy-four-year history of the Oscar) was held to be deeply significant in marking a professional development for black actresses and a progressive narrative of racial discourses. Almost fifty years earlier, Dorothy Dandridge had been the first black woman to be nominated in the Best Actress category for the role of Carmen in Otto Preminger's film version of Bizet's opera Carmen Jones (1954). But whereas Dandridge's success had been against the odds - a 'Negro' woman in a white man's world - Berry belongs to a supposedly integrated society where black women are said to have the same opportunities as everyone else. Berry's Oscar seemed to mark a progression from times past, when black actresses were either absent from stage and screen or played minor or racially typecast supporting parts as mammies, matriarchs, Jezebels or tragic mulattoes. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel and Ethel Waters were subjected to the wrath of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP - founded 1910) for accepting roles as maids and servants that were thought to perpetuate racial stereotypes of black women, whereas Berry appears to be part of a generation where casting is no longer based primarily on associations with a particular skin colour, but is made on the basis of acting 'talent'.

The theatre has always been an itinerant art which recognises the need to take its product to its audiences, as well as a responsive art which identifies its financial survival in its ability to meet audience demands. For some English companies in the mid- and late nineteenth century, survival was ineluctably bound up with the need to support the opulent central London locations which were both a huge financial burden, and a necessary part of the theatre's effort to attract and to sustain a middle-class audience. Henry Irving's Lyceum was one of the most luxurious and socially successful of these theatres. Secure in its social reputation, with visits from royalty and the leading figures of British, European and American cultural life, nonetheless the Lyceum's London productions made a loss between 1875 and 1899 of almost £22,000. The company's financial stability was only secured by its exhaustive domestic and international tours. North America proved its most valuable source of income, with each performance grossing over £80, as opposed to the loss of £5 10s for each London performance. Thus, as Tracy C. Davis points out, touring should not be understood as a bonus or residual profit, building on London profits; rather, touring made being in London possible. The splendours which signified the Lyceum's London stage were only made possible by the company's tours in the United States, Australia and the provinces. But other reasons existed too for the national and international tours that were increasingly becoming a regular part of the theatre company's routine.

“The autobiographical occasion (whether performance or text) becomes a site . . . ripe with diverse potentials . . . [and] can be productive in . . . articulating problems of identity and identification.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson / Actresses' autobiographies and autobiographical performances figure in several volumes on women and autobiography, but not in a number that reflects the ratio of actress-autobiography to other types of female life writing. Part of the problem is that the actress in history has represented an atypical figure, one of the few examples of women with a public life. Actresses usurped the male right to a public persona both as individuals and as a class, but without losing their subordinate and domestic role as women: this dichotomy is inevitably manifest in the actress-autobiographer's writing. This chapter offers both an overview of actresses' autobiography to 1939 and a model for reading these works for their 'diverse potentials'. It embraces the autobiographical work of performers from the 'beginnings' of the publication of actresses' autobiographies to the point in the 1930s where the 'autobiographical act' had stabilised as a commodity. The number of actress-autobiographers examined is inevitably limited by space, the range discussed intentionally diverse, situating the famous alongside the less well known, the Shakespearean alongside the musical comedy performer.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was plenty of evidence, in interviews with and articles by Shakespearean actresses, that the perspectives of second-wave feminism had influenced their thinking about the characters and stories of Shakespeare's plays. The question arises, however, as to what difference, if any, this new awareness has made to what the twenty-first-century audience sees. Little in the record of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company in recent years indicates any change in the relation between women performers and the Shakespeare industry. The few plays directed by women have been disliked or ignored by critics and other opinion-makers. As for the new generation of actresses, the older stars were still the dominant attraction. Judi Dench, for example, played the Countess in All's Well That Ends Well in 2004, to rave reviews that had a strong undertone of nostalgia and valediction: here was an actress who had blazed her way through an astonishing range of Shakespearean roles for nearly forty years (not to mention modern drama, film and television comedy), possibly playing her last major stage role. One critic's comments sum up Dench's unique contribution to Shakespearean acting in the second half of the twentieth century: “What Judi Dench does as the Countess in All's Well That Ends Well goes way beyond acting. She combines humility with authority, she makes the world on the stage larger by the quality of her attention to others, she conceives her role in a large arc that takes her audience a mighty distance, and she plays it with an economy through which tiny movements and inflections pierce straight to the heart.”

“Hard by Pell-Mell, lives a wench cal'd Nell, / King Charles the second he kept her, / She hath got a trick to handle his . . . [prick] / But never lays hands on his Scepter. / All matters of State, from her Soul she does hate, / And leave[s] to the Pollitick Bitches, / The Whore's in the right, for 'tis her delight, / To be scratching just where it Itches.” Anonymous lampoon / From the moment the first British professional actress appeared on the London stage in 1661 she became an object of fascination. She was both admired and derided, desired and vilified. The very public sphere in which her craft was practised quickly led to parallels with prostitution in a patriarchal society employing the binaries of private/public, virgin/whore as constructs of femininity. Seventeenth-century society was enthralled by the actress's craft on stage and simultaneously engrossed by the stories surrounding her sexual liaisons off stage. The elision between her public and private identity, the visual spectacle of her acting body on stage and the availability of her sexually active body off stage, reveals a bifocal perspective that has captured the popular imagination, underpinned biographies and histories of the actress and, as the quotation above demonstrates, fuelled a lucrative trade in gossip for over three hundred years. Here, the cultural embodiment of the early actress, Nell Gwynn, is represented in her most famous role: the fun-loving whore of the 'Merry Monarch', Charles II. As one of His Majesty's Servants, Gwynn's public/private performance is focused on the pleasures of the flesh: her interest in and enjoyment of the private body royal, favourably set against interests in the public body politic enjoyed by the king's much-hated aristocratic mistresses, especially his French mistress, Louise de la Kéroualle.

Nicholas Rowe's play The Fair Penitent, which was first performed in 1703, provided the eighteenth century with one of its most popular heroines, Calista. In the following speech, she vents a rare moment of anger in a play that paints a bleak picture of women's fate: “How hard is the condition of our sex, / Through ev'ry state of life the slaves of man! / In all the dear, delightful days of youth / A rigid father dictates to our will, / And deals out pleasure with a scanty hand; / To his, the tyrant husband's reign succeeds; / Proud with opinion of superior reason, / He holds domestic business and devotion / All we are capable to know, and shuts us, / Like cloistered idiots, from the world's acquaintance / And all the joys of freedom; wherefore are we / Born with high souls but to assert ourselves, / Shake off this vile obedience they exact, / And claim an equal empire o'er the world?” The Fair Penitent was designed to inspire an overwhelming sensation of pity rather than to make an intellectual argument for equality between men and women. Nonetheless, Calista became famous in the popular imagination as an advocate for the female sex and was often cited as a model of endurance by proto-feminist writers. Rowe asks the audience to see through Calista's eyes, if only for a moment, offering a woman's assessment of the world she lives in rather than a more stereotypical vision of passive femininity. Such moments of dramatic intensity were known as 'hits' or 'points' and often remained fixed in the public memory long after the play's plot had been forgotten.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, new spectacles of feminine suffering began to appear on the fashionable French and English stages as audiences were mesmerised by the figure of the fallen woman and the actresses who played her. The French actress who took the role of courtesan, or the English actress who played a disgraced wife or prostitute, risked the stigma of their own profession and that of the fallen woman. 'For a large section of society,' writes Tracy C. Davis on the employment of actresses in the nineteenth century, 'the similarities between the actress's life and the prostitute's or demi-mondaine's were unforgettable and overruled all other evidence about respectability. She was “no better than she should be”.' Juxtaposed with the risk to the actress of being seen as 'no better than she should be' was the 'redemption' of star actress through her celebrity status. It is a condition of celebrity-making that a star's aura, her charisma, can overcome these kinds of tensions and conflicts. This goes some way to explaining why, for example, Ellen Terry was fête 'an icon of Victorian femininity' despite being a mother of two illegitimate children. The two actresses focused on in this chapter, Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs Patrick Campbell, both had illegitimate children, numerous affairs and failed marriages, but both achieved international stardom, and in Bernhardt's case especially, cult status.