English actor, born at Wyvenhoe in Essex on the 22nd of June 1863, and educated at King’s College school, London. He was intended for a naval architect, but took to the stage, and appeared first in 1881 at the age of fourteen in a boy’s part at the Court theatre, London. Next year he was engaged by Irving at the Lyceum and remained in his company for fourteen years, playing minor parts in London but leading parts during summer tours. In 1898 he played Pelléas in Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande, and in 1899 he entered into management with The Only Way, an adaptation of Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, in which he scored a great success. Other successes were in A Cigarette-Maker’s Romance and The Breed of the Treshams. In later years he was active in promoting the production of Shakespearean plays, both in London and in the provinces, playing the leading parts himself, and he was the King in Reinhardt’s production of Œdipus Rex at Covent Garden January 1912. He married Angelita Helena de Silva, herself an actress and exponent of Shakespearean heroines. He was knighted January 1, 1921. During the World War Sir John Martin-Harvey delivered a large number of recruiting lectures on Sunday evenings in leading theatres throughout the United Kingdom, beginning in September 1914. By collections made there and elsewhere, by himself and Lady Harvey, he raised sums for the British Red Cross, and for wounded soldiers, nurses and other sufferers by the war, amounting in all to about £25,000.
