Profile • The first Eliza Doolittle — Mrs Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Stella Tanner) via: Rogues & Vagabonds

“Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.” This famous line from George Bernard Shaw‘s Pygmalion was first spoken by Mrs Patrick Campbell in the original production in 1914. At the time she was almost 50 years old and yet she was considered such a distinctive actress that she could make an audience believe in her youth…

In her later years she went to live in the States. She lives on in her quotes, the most famous being: “It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom, as long as you don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses,’ and in the lengthy correspondence between her and Shaw which was turned into a play by Jerome Kilty called Dear Liar…

via Profile • Mrs Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Stella Tanner) | Rogues & Vagabonds.

And for an insider’s view of British theater click anywhere on the blue letters:

“The idea behind the site was – and is — to bring the theatrical past alive and cast a fresh eye over the contemporary scene, untrammelled by the restrictions often in place with ‘accepted’ media outlets.

I was born in a trunk.

© Sarah Vernon