Short-lived Marriage

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 793, 1 October 1954, Page 17

Short-lived Marriage

at AT the Haymarket I was not even passionately anxious to do my best. I was just dreaming of and aspiring after another world, a world full 6f pictures and music ahd geritle, artistic people with quiet voices and elegant manners. The reality of such a world was Little Holland House, the home of Mr.

Watts. . .’ So Ellen | Terry wrote in her. memoirs. "IT was not quite sixteen years old," she went on, "too youfig t6 be martied even in those days, when evetyone married early. But I was delighted, and my _ parents were delighted, although the disparity |

of age between my husband and tme was. very great. It all seems like qa dreamhot a clear dream, but a fitful one which in the morning one tries in vaifi to tell, .." The stoty of the short-lived marriage of Ellen Terry to the pre-Raphaelite painter G. F. Watts, who was thirty years her seniot, is full of human drama, apart from its biographical importance. He was at the height of his fame: she was still an unknown actress. Their union seems to have been doomed from the start; but if her husband had fot sent her back, heartbroken, to her family, the theatre might never have been enriched by the great Dame Ellen Terry. Mrs. Watts, a BBC production of a play by Lisa Sheridan, based on this episode in Ellen Terry’s life, will be heard from 1YC on Thursday, October | 7. at 10.0 p.m.