Сара Сиддонс: Уэльс туған актрисаның өмірі мен сахна жолы

Welsh born actress (1755–1831)

Sarah Siddons (née Kemble; 5 July 1755 – 8 June 1831) and Siddons was at the heart of it. Portraits depicted actresses in aristocratic dress, the recently industrialised newspapers spread actresses' names and images and gossip about their private lives spread through the public. Though few people had actually seen Siddons perform, her name had been circulated to such an extent that when it was announced "the crowd behaved as if they knew her already". Their on stage roles and personal biographies blurred leading many actresses to use these extreme representations of femininity to create a persona that could be viewed both on and off stage.

Siddons was born Sarah Kemble in Brecon, Brecknockshire, Wales, the eldest daughter of Roger Kemble, a Roman Catholic, and Sarah "Sally" Ward, a Protestant. Sarah and her sisters were raised in their mother's faith and her brothers were raised in their father's faith. Roger Kemble was the manager of a touring theatre company, the Warwickshire Company of Comedians. Although the theatre company included most members of the Kemble family, Siddons' parents initially disapproved of her choice of profession. At that time, acting was only beginning to become a respectable profession for a woman. Siddons served as a lady's maid and later as companion to Lady Mary Bertie Greatheed at Guy's Cliffe near Warwick. In 1777, she went on "the circuit" in the provinces. For the next six years she worked in provincial companies, in particular York and Bath. Her first appearance at Bath's Old Orchard Street Theatre was in autumn 1778 at a salary of £3 per week (3.0 in 1778 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years, or approximately $). This amount grew as her performances became better known, and as she began to appear in Bristol at the Theatre Royal, King Street (which now houses the Bristol Old Vic), also run by John Palmer. Siddons lived with her husband and children in a Georgian house at 33 The Paragon in Bath, until her final performance there in May 1782. The full speech was published in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 4th July 1782. The presentation of her own motherhood was something she used throughout her career, notably when she performed her next Drury Lane appearance, on 10 October 1782, which could not have been more different from her debut performances. She was an immediate sensation playing the title role in Garrick's adaptation of a play by Thomas Southerne, Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage. So good was she that "Her pathetic embodiment of domestic woe created a sensation, flooding the audience with tears and exciting critics to hyperbolic praise."

Siddons continued to act in the provinces, appearing at The Theatre, Leeds, in 1786 and consistently brought a thorough understanding to each of her roles. It was through her portrayals of Lady Macbeth and Isabella, particularly, that Siddons offered a new way of approaching character. Siddons has been credited for inventing and promoting textual accuracy above the theatrical traditions of her time: "Siddons was unique for making herself familiar with the entire script, sitting offstage in order to hear the full play, and paying careful attention to her scene partners and to textual clues that could aid performance." She spellbound her audience through the grandeur of her emotions as she expressed Lady Macbeth's murderous passions. Rather than portraying Lady Macbeth as a murderous evil queen, Siddons depicted her with a strong sense of maternity and a delicate femininity. Her choice to tackle this role was fascinating as cross gendered roles were "generally more difficult and demanding than a breeches role". The performer would need to sustain the illusion for the whole duration of the play as opposed to a breeches role which is much more brief and gained comedic success from the character's poor delivery at representing the opposite sex. Far from a one off curiosity, "Siddons played Hamlet repeatedly, if sporadically, for three decades, always in the provinces and never in London, until she reached the age of fifty". Sarah Siddons first played Hamlet in Worcester in 1775 and then in Manchester opposite her brother John Philip Kemble as Laertes March 1777. At the Bristol theatre, she played Hamlet in 1781. She went on to repeat the role in Liverpool. In Dublin, she played Hamlet during the season of 1802 03 and once more in 1805. She proposed that last performance to her friend and fellow actor William Galindo as a revival of their successful 1802 performance, with herself as Hamlet and Galindo as Laertes. This 1805 revival production made enough of an impression to be caricatured in The Dublin Satirist five years later in 1810.

It was the beginning of twenty years in which she became the undisputed Queen of Drury Lane. Her celebrity status was called "mythical" and "monumental", and by the mid 1780s Siddons had established herself as a cultural icon. Shearer West, in an analysis of the collapse of Siddons' private and public personas, wrote that Siddons' brother, the actor manager John Philip Kemble, "substantially rewrote passages in some of the plays in order to temper any indelicacy [and] transcend sexual indiscretions" that could harm her reputation of feminine propriety. Some scholars believe that although Siddons' fame and success appeared effortless, it was in fact "a highly constructed process". She would only choose roles which could aid her popularity and protect her image. By cleverly blurring the distinction between the characters she played on stage and her presentation offstage,

Siddons occasionally gave public readings of plays, and the Scottish poet/playwright Joanna Baillie recorded her thoughts of several performances given in 1813. Despite her reservations about Siddon's "frequent bursts of voice beyond what natural passion warranted," Baillie wrote to Sir Walter Scott, "take it all in all was fine & powerful acting; and when it has ceased we of this generation can never look to see the like again." Mary Hamilton's correspondence with her fiancé illuminated its seamless transition from "the artist's studio to the theatrical stage", practical venues that interlocked in the eighteenth century and formed a large part in creating the very idea of celebrity. A contemporary biographer recalled "carriages thronged to the artist's door; and, if every fine lady who stepped out of them did not actually weep before the painting, they had all of them, at least their white handkerchiefs ready for that demonstration of sensibility".

As noted in Campbell's biography, Siddons returned to the role some six years later, and in 1802 she left Drury Lane for its rival establishment, Covent Garden. Siddons formally retired from the stage in 1812, but reappeared on special occasions. An 1816 request by Princess Charlotte of Wales to see Lady Macbeth brought Siddons out of retirement. William Hazlitt, in his later accounts, stated that her performances lacked the grandeur they had shown in 1785: the "machinery of her voice is slow, there is too long a pause between each sentence [and the] sleeping scene was more laboured and less natural". As a result, according to Lisa Freeman, Siddons' "iconic status came into conflict with the aesthetic of authenticity that she cultivated".

Sarah Siddons died in 1831 in London. She was interred in Saint Mary's Cemetery at Paddington Green. She was described as a goddess, a royal, majestic. The extent of her celebrity reaches forward to today.

Siddons Tower, a folly tower erected c. 1777 on the water's edge at Rostellan near Cork Harbour in Ireland,
Sarah Siddons' House (the Old House) in Lower Lydbrook, Gloucestershire is reputedly her childhood home. In 1923, London's Metropolitan Railway brought into service an electric locomotive named Sarah Siddons, No. 12. The locomotive remained in service along with others like it on the London Underground Metropolitan line until 1961. Painted a maroon colour, she is now the only one of the original twenty locomotives to remain preserved in working order. Women's achievement was celebrated in the girls only secondary school, with houses named after famous English women. In 1980, it became part of the North Westminster Community School, then in 2006 it was closed before the site was sold for residential development. In 2019, a 'Remembering Sarah Siddons Comprehensive School' Facebook group had more than 540 members. In 2020, a memorial plaque was unveiled at the site of her first professional appearance, in Worcester.