Charles Hawtrey (actor, born 1858)
Sir Charles Henry Hawtrey was an English actor, director, producer and manager. He pursued a successful career as an actor-manager, specialising in debonair, often disreputable, parts in popular comedies. He occasionally played in Sheridan and other classics, but was generally associated with new works by writers including Oscar Wilde and Somerset Maugham.
Charles Hawtrey in Money (1911)
Charles Hawtrey, 1907
Hawtrey in what the Illustrated London News called "essentially a Charles Hawtrey part", in Inconstant George (1910)
Poster from a performance of Hawtrey's The Private Secretary at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh in 1886
William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.
Maugham by Carl Van Vechten, 1934
Maugham's birthplace: the British Embassy in Paris
Maugham in the early 20th century
Lady Frederick, 1907