[Henry Brodribb]. English actor, elder son of Sir Henry Irving; born in London on the 5th of August 1870. He was educated at Marlborough and New College, Oxford, and was called to the bar in 1894; but he quickly abandoned this profession for that of the stage, for which his inherited aptitude had always been very marked. At Oxford he had belonged to the O.U.D.S. and had played the leading parts in Brownings Strafford and Shakespeares King John. His first professional appearance in London was made in September 1891 with John Hare at the Garrick theatre in Robertsons School. Three years later he joined Mr. Ben Greets company, where he met Miss Dorothea Baird, whom he married in 1896 at the time of her great popular success in du Mauriers play of Trilby. His earliest notable success was in Barries The Admirable Crichton in 1903, and he followed it by an interesting impersonation of Hamlet in 1905. His picturesque appearance and strong likeness to his father induced him to repeat many of his fathers famous parts; but he did original work of a high order in Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in Stephen Phillipss The Sin of David, in Walter Hacketts The Barton Mystery, and in other romantic and melodramatic productions, many of them produced at the Savoy theatre, London, of which he was lessee and manager from 1913 until his death. Throughout his life he was a keen student of criminology, and he published a Life of Judge Jeffreys (1898); French Criminals of the 19th Century (1901); A Book of Remarkable Criminals (1918) and other papers on the subject. He died in London on the 17th of October 1919.
His younger brother, Laurence Sydney Brodribb Irving (18711914), English actor, was born in London on the 21st of December 1871. He was educated at Marlborough and abroad, being destined for the diplomatic service; but he joined Frank Bensons Shakespearean company in 1893 and made his first professional appearance in London a year later with J. L. Toole in Barries Walker, London. He married the actress Mabel Hackney, and with his wife played in Brieuxs The Three Daughters of M. Dupont and The Incubus, as well as in The Unwritten Lawhis own adaptation of Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishmentand in Lengyells Typhoon. In 1912 he acted Iago in Herbert Trees production of Othello. He wrote Peter the Great, produced by his father in 1898, Bonnie Dundee and Richard Lovelace, as well as a number of translations and adaptations of plays. Both he and his wife lost their lives when the Empress of Ireland sank in the St. Lawrence river on the 29th of May 1914.