Louis Calvert

Louis James Calvert (25 November 1859 – 18 July 1923) was a British stage and early film actor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and an actor-manager. He is perhaps best remembered today for having created roles in plays by George Bernard Shaw and for appearing in King John (1899), the earliest known example of any film based on Shakespeare,

Calvert was born in Manchester, Lancashire one of eight children, and the third son, of the actors Charles Alexander Calvert and his wife Adelaide Calvert (baptised April 1836 - died 20 September 1921). He was educated privately in Manchester and in Germany. Although actively discouraged by his parents from taking up acting as a career, Louis Calvert made his theatrical debut in Natal in South Africa in 1878 before moving on to appear in Australia and then returning to Great Britain in 1880. During the 1880s he trained at Sarah Thorne's School of Acting at Margate, Kent, and went on to appear with Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London and toured with Lillie Langtry in the United States.

He played Mark Antony to Frank Benson's Julius Caesar, and for the Manchester Committee of the Independent Theatre Society he staged and produced an Elizabethan-style version of Richard II in 1895. This innovative production brought Calvert to the attention of actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who made him co-producer of his production of Henry IV, Part 1 at the Haymarket Theatre in May 1896, and again with Julius Caesar at Her Majesty's Theatre in January 1898. He appeared in Ben Greet's 1897 production of Macbeth at the Olympic Theatre. He appeared as Casca in Tree's 1899 production Julius Caesar, and as Cardinal Pandulf in The Life and Death of King John in the same year, which was filmed as King John (1899), the earliest known example of any film based on Shakespeare. For Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket Theatre Calvert played Francis Flute in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1900, and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing in 1905. Of Calvert's interpretation of Dogberry, George Bernard Shaw wrote in the Saturday Review: "To Mr Calvert [the dialogue] is as natural as his native speech; he makes it clear, expressive and vivid without the least preoccupation."

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