Frances "Fanny" Whiteside Brough was a Paris-born British stage actress who came from a literary and dramatic family. She is remembered especially for her many comedy roles performed over a four decade-long career. Brough was acting professionally in London by 1870. She played in a variety of comic and dramatic roles in Britain with several companies and toured America early in the 20th century with Charles Hawtrey. Her career reached a high point in 1902 with her creation of the title role of Kitty Warren in George Bernard Shaw'sMrs. Warren's Profession. She continued to act until shortly before her death.
Early life and career
Brough was born in Paris, and baptised on 23 February 1853 at the Parish Church of St. Peter in Liverpool. She was the daughter of Robert Barnabas Brough, a noted journalist, poet and librettist who died a few days before her eighth birthday, and his wife Elizabeth, née Romer, a cousin of the sopranoEmma Romer, and a sister of the singer Ann Romer, wife of her husband's older brother, the writer William Brough. Fanny Brough's father was also the brother of the science writerJohn Cargill Brough and actor-comedian Lionel Brough, a cousin to the geologist Robert Brough Smyth and the father of the actor/manager Lionel Barnabas Brough. Brough's professional stage debut came in 1869 with Charles Calvert's company at the Prince's Theatre in Manchester, where in March of the following year she played Ophelia opposite Barry Sullivan's prince in Hamlet. Her London debut came on 15 October 1870 at the St James's Theatre playing the title role in Southerland Edwards's adaptation of Sardou'sFernande. She then played with the Bancrofts in a revival of Money. Brough found success in 1878 as Mary Melrose in provincial road productions of Henry James Byron's Our Boys and as Norah Fitzgerald in Henry Hamilton's 1886 play Harvest staged at London's Princess's Theatre. Brough created the role of Petrella in The Passion Flower; or, Woman and the Law, a drama adapted from the Leopoldo Cano-y-Masas play La Pasionaria, which was originally produced in England as "The Woman and the Law" at the Theatre Royal in Hull on 28 July 1884 and at London's Olympic Theatre on 13 March 1885. The publication Pen, Pencil, Baton and Mask wrote in an 1890 sketch of Brough,
Marriage and later years
In the summer of 1878, in London, Brough married Richard Smith Bull, an actor and stage manager who went by the nom de théâtre, Richard Smith Boleyn. In 1891, Brough became the first president of the Theatrical Ladies' Guild, an organization created to help destitute actresses who were about to become mothers. Brough played the Irish servant, Mary O’Brien, in the hit play The RealLittle Lord Fauntleroy, from the book by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which opened on 23 February 1888 at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Throughout much of the 1880s and into the 1890s, Brough toured in road productions headed by Kyrle Bellew and Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter. She played Lady Markby in one of Oscar Wilde's last plays, An Ideal Husband, which opened on 3 January 1895 at the Haymarket Theatre in London. In 1902 Brough created the role of Kitty Warren in Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, and the following year she toured in America with Charles Hawtrey in productions of F. Anstey's The Man from Blankley's and The Saucy Sally by F. C. Burnand. Two years later she produced and played the lead in R. V. Harcourt's 1905 comedy, An Angle Unawares, which opened in London at Terry's Theatre on 12 September. She may have concluded her career in the latter part of 1913 playing O'Mara, a role she is said to have performed with vibrant, infectious humour in a Drury Lane Theatre production of Cecil Raleigh and Henry Hamilton's comedy, Sealed Orders. Brough died in London in 1914, aged 62.
