Celebrated actor, friend and associate of Dickens, Browning, and most of the principal figures in the drama and literature of mid nineteenth century, William Charles Macready was also a compulsive diarist. His journal of twenty-one years is a candid and absorbing self-revelation. A man of quick temper and often extraordinary contradiction of character, he lived at odds with the profession he led and which he did so much to lift. None of the essentials missed, he comments on the assault on Bunn, the affair with actress Helen Faucit, and his fierce rivalry with Forrest, as well as a complete portrait of a difficult, exciting man, his fights with himself and others.

Author Biography

J.C.Trewin was a British journalist, drama critic and theatrical historian. His parents were Cornish, but he was born in Plymouth in 1908 and brought up in Cornwall. Educated at Plymouth College, his first job was as a cub reporter on the city's Sunday newspaper, the Western Independent, in 1926. After six years he left for London and joined the Morning Post as a reporter and drama critic. On the paper's closure in 1937 he moved to The Observer, doubling as a drama critic and later as literary editor. From the early 1950s he concentrated on the theatre, working for a number of publications including Punch, the Listener, the Birmingham Post, the Illustrated London News and The Lady. He wrote some forty books of theatre history and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1981. He died in 1990. He is memorialised by the British Critics' Circle in an award that bears his name (and that of his wife, Wendy) for the best Shakespearean performance of the year.