Sarah Siddons
Here's Sarah Siddons, the mega-famous actress of the 18th century:
Here is the Wikipedia link, which is perfectly good for the basics: she was really famous, she was renowned for playing Lady Macbeth, and so on. As I write this, however, the Wikipedia entry is a bit uneven both stylistically and factually: it says she played Aphasia in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, when (as far as I can tell) she played a character named Arpasia in Tamerlane, by Nicholas Rowe (not Marlowe).
It also misses all sorts of fun anecdotes: e.g., Sir Walter Scott poking fun at her for speaking in blank verse off-stage. I have no idea what's true, exaggerated, or pure gossip, but Siddons had the kind of fame that makes this sort of confusion illustrative.
Here's an extremely incomplete list of ways in which her career intersects with other notables':
- Nicholas Rowe was a lot more famous than his current reputation (or at least his current American reputation) would suggest. He was Poet Laureate; his The Fair Penitent was mega-famous (and gave us the term "Lothario"); and the aforementioned Tamerlane was a big hit.
- The two portraits above are by the famous (and famously rivalrous) Joshua Reynolds (left) and Thomas Gainsborough (right). Both of them painted Siddons without a commission, figuring that she was famous enough that a portrait of her was a good bet.
- Boswell's Life of Johnson reports that she visited Samuel Johnson, who had no chair available for her immediately, and joked: "Madam, you who so often occasion a want of seats to other people, will the more easily excuse the want of one yourself."
- Queen Charlotte made her "reader to the royal princesses," which (as far as I can tell) involved not much tutoring but occasional on-demand performances to the George III and Charlotte. There's a story in Thomas Campbell's biography of her in which she kept on reading to the Queen until she was "ready to drop" because she was afraid of falling over on the polished floor in her fancy clothes. (Etiquette required her to walk backwards out of the room in that situation.)
You might be likeliest to hear of Siddons because she gives her name to the Sarah Siddons Award, a real award inspired by a fictional award (of the same name) from All About Eve.