English actor and manager, born near London on the 14th of May 1841. His first appearance on the stage was in 1861 at Birmingham, and he played in the provinces with success for several years. His first London appearance was in 1865 in Wooler’s A Winning Hazard at the Prince of Wales’s theatre off Tottenham Court Road, then under the management of Effie Marie Wilton (1839–1921), whom he married in 1868. Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft were associated in the production of all the Robertson comedies:—Society (1865), Ours (1866), Caste (1867), Play (1868), School (1869) and M.P. (1870), and, after Robertson’s death, in revivals of the old comedies, for which they surrounded themselves with an admirable company. Lytton’s Money (1872), Boucicault’s London Assurance (1877), and Diplomacy—an adaptation of Sardou’s Dora—were among their premières, which helped to make the little playhouse famous. The Bancroft management at the Prince of Wales’s constituted a new era in the development of the English stage, and had the effect of reviving the London interest in modern drama. In 1879 they moved to the Haymarket, where Sardou’s Odette (for which they engaged Madame Modjeska) and Fédora, W. S. Gilbert’s Sweethearts and Pinero’s Lords and Commons, with revivals of previous successes, were among their productions. Having made a considerable fortune, they retired in 1885, but Mr. Bancroft (who was knighted in 1897) joined Sir Henry Irving in 1889 to play the abbé Latour in a revival of Watts Phillips’s Dead Heart. He made his last regular appearance on the stage as Count Orloff in a revival of Diplomacy at the Garrick theatre in 1893. The company were summoned to play before Queen Victoria at Balmoral Castle in October of that year. He subsequently only appeared occasionally at special performances, the latest and most notable of which was at His Majesty’s theatre, London, in December 1918 when he played Triplet in Masks and Faces.
His wife, Lady Bancroft, died at Folkestone, on the 22nd of May 1921. She had first appeared on the stage under her maiden name of Marie Effie Wilton at Manchester as Fleance in Macbeth and as Prince Arthur in King John as early as 1847. She made her début in London in 1856 with Charles Dillon at the Lyceum theatre as Henri in Belphegor. Her brilliant career as an actress, from the time when in 1865 she went into management at the Prince of Wales’s theatre, and married Mr. (afterwards Sir Squire) Bancroft in 1868, came to a close in 1885, when she and her husband retired from the stage; but Lady Bancroft reappeared with him in the Diplomacy revival of 1893, and twice subsequently made a single appearance at a special matinee, the last occasion being the benefit performance for Miss Nellie Farren in March 1898.
See Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft, on and off the Stage (1888), and The Bancrofts: Recollections of Sixty Years (1909), by themselves.
