Nepo Baby

 In my continuing research around the life, times and connections of Miss Ethel Warwick, I was interested to see how many members of the acting profession were actually children of actors. It seemed so normal that the fact Ethel did not come from a long line of thespians seemed noteworthy to the newspapers.  In recent years, I have heard the term 'Nepo Baby' used against actors (actually, normally actresses) as if to explain how they became famous so promptly. Maya Hawke, Angelina Jolie, Carrie Fisher and the many others could not possibly be talented!  It must be their famous parents! All this leads me to the slightly cautionary tale of Miss Nancy Waller...

Lewis Waller as Lysander (1900)

My adoration of Lewis Waller is well and truly on display in this post, but he and his wife Florence West were a theatrical power couple beyond compare. Despite the fact that she was repeatedly referred to as 'Mrs Lewis Waller' rather than her stage name belays the fact that she was equally as important and respected as he was. I'm trying to think of a modern equivalent - Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz? Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively? Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick? - Anyway, when Oscar Wilde wrote An Ideal Husband in 1895, she was his Mrs Cheveley, which is recommendation enough. Despite the birth of her son Edmund in 1884 and her daughter Nancy twelve years later, Florence didn't seem to break her stride, going off on tour not long after Nancy's birth in 1896. 

Edmund Waller (c.1920)

While Edmund obviously is of interest to me because of his marriage to Ethel Warwick, I noticed that he seemed to try to keep a professional distance from his parents.  In this, he mostly failed because (a) his parents were superstars and (b) I'm not convinced he was a good enough actor to get out from under his father's shadow.  I can definitely see having a father ruling the acting profession you are trying to break into being a massive problem, although arguably Michael Douglas would say otherwise, as would Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estervez.  Maybe because Edmund was born while the couple were building their careers, or because Nancy arrived at the beginning of her parents' superstardom, not to mention the fact that she was incredibly cute, Nancy started appearing in the Wallers' publicity photographs.

Florence West and Daughter (c.1900)

Nancy was only 6 years when she took to the stage. This beat Ellen Terry (aged 9) but was the same age as Drew Barrymore in ET.  The last was particularly illuminating to me as Drew Barrymore as Gertie is so natural and charming that it is easy to see how a child can make a brilliant actress.  The newspaper's were equally charmed, as the Birmingham Mail reported 'This embryo actress rejoices at having arrived at the mature age of six, and is quite convinced that to forbid her playing Toto every night is an injustice for which somebody ought to answer.' The problem came in her mother's production of Zaza in 1901 which featured Nancy as 'Toto', although the Wallers really only wanted their daughter to perform in the matinees.  Nancy was obviously having none of it. She was so praised for her performance that the Empire News wrote a poem 'To a Sweet Child on her First Appearance'...

Baby came and played a part,

Baby won applause.

Baby gained the public's heart;

Why was it? Because - 

Baby was real and Baby was fresh,

Baby remarks she was a 'b'cess'*

Hush-a-bye Baby, on the tree top,

When Baby appears the applause doesn't stop.

(*This is 'baby babble' for 'success')

Ellen Terry and her granddaughter Nelly Gordon (c.1918)

For Edwardian actresses, having children could well trip up your career (for Health and Safety reasons - Juliet isn't usually heavily pregnant during the balcony scene) but it seems Florence didn't seem to slow down and used motherhood in publicity.  Suddenly there were not only pictures of Florence, of Mrs Lewis Waller, but also of Mrs Lewis Waller and Daughter.  In this, she is not unusual, as actresses like Ivy Close and Ellen Terry took a similar stance, feeding the public with carefully curated images of aspirational family. Ellen Terry went as far as to be pictured with her grandchildren, I think in a way displaying an acting dynasty. It almost didn't matter if the child went on the stage in a professional way, the novelty of being the child of a famous actor was a pull to theatre crowds who were already feeling involved in their idols private lives.  Thinking about the private lives of the generation before the Wallers, it was a very sterilised picture that the public were exposed to.  

What I find interesting about Nancy is that she quite quickly becomes her father's sidekick, appearing with him, photographed by him and generally being his shadow. As you will know from my post on Waller, he was absolutely worshipped and so I think this sort of content would have been massively popular with his public. I also notice that there are frustratingly few photographs of his with his wife, which can be read in many ways.  They did not seem to act together after 1900, the period which seems to have sparked the mass producing of picture postcards of actors. Also, she might have wished to keep a bit of a distance from being Waller's wife, being the lesser of the pair if they had been pictured together. This, of course, is not the case with Nancy.

In November 1908, Nancy appeared at the Royal Command performance of The Duke's Motto at Windsor, a play which famously stared her father in one of his popular 'cape and sword' pieces, revived in the autumn of 1908. When they performed for the King, Nancy was included in the cast as a page.  It was apparent that although she had previously appeared in her parent's plays, she was not regarded as anything other than their child.

Stereoscope picture of Lewis and Nancy Waller (c.1902)

Nancy very quickly got into the role of the actress-daughter in the family business, talking to the press about her performances in a grown up manner, although still under 10 years old.  She shared the role of Toto in Zaza with a girl who could play the recorder (which the character required).  Nancy had to have a man behind the curtain playing for her while she mimed and she told the newspapers of an incident when he missed his cue only to start playing when she was not in position making her scramble to her spot and the audience laughed in fond appreciation. She quickly became Lewis' Daughter (TM), a role of its own. When he sailed to New York in 1911, she was reported to have been on the dockside, waving him away.  Partly because her brother was so much older than her, and partly because he was married by 1908 to fellow actress Ethel Warwick, Nancy seemed to act as the 'only child' to her parents, especially her father, a beautiful, slightly melancholic-faced child beside her handsome, noble father.

Florence West's work kept her very busy, touring in Zaza internationally and also making the role of Milady in The Three Musketeers her own, garnering a letter from old friend Oscar Wilde who declared he had heard her 'Miladi' was brilliant. She was generous, encouraging, professional and brilliant, moving audiences to tears on a regular basis and so it was a terrible shock to everyone when she died in November 1912, aged only 53.

Mrs Lewis Waller and Daughter (c.1903)

I was impressed that Florence's obituary in The Era did not mention her children at all, or her husband to any great extent, concentrating solely on her and her accomplishments.  While this sounds appropriate to a modern ear, you can imagine what a leap that was for the Edwardian public. Mentioned in passing in her obituary in the Aberdeen Press and Journal is possibly a reason why Nancy became her father's shadow.  In 1906, after a long run with Zaza, Florence went to Algiers to recover from a nervous breakdown, which was only reported as she was involved in a court case over a motor car and unable to appear in court. After her return, she appeared in music hall rather than grand drama, arranging abbreviated versions of her greatest hits, and delighting audiences with lighter fare than before.  She moved to Flanshaw outside Bognor Regis on the south coast, possibly for her health, while it appears Nancy remained in London at least part of the time, with her father.

It is unsurprising therefore that when Lewis Waller set off on tour to Australia and South Africa in 1913, he took Nancy with him, not to mention his son Edmund as well. The group had a lucky escape when Waller's car collided with a tram, miraculously sparing all the passengers but totally wrecking the car.  The family of actors returned to a country suddenly at war, and Waller was required to give his Henry V speech for recruitment purposes, touring the country, again with Nancy in tow. She was with him in Nottingham in 1915 when he and Madge Titheradge began a tour which was halted in October when he became ill and was taken for rest to the Rufford Hotel. The newspapers were agog for days as Nancy and her uncle, Waller's brother and manager, remained by his bedside.  For a day he seemed to rally, then he died in his sleep from double pneumonia with Nancy still in the chair beside him. He was three days short of his 55th birthday, and 19 year old Nancy was an orphan.

As I have relayed in my post on Ethel Warwick, by 1915 Edmund had divorced her.  The whole affair of the death of Florence, coupled with Edmund's fleeing his wife and child abroad and having to be retrieved, put an large amount of stress on Waller, who acted as far as he could on Ethel's behalf. With both parents dead and (excuse me saying so) a less than ideal brother, Nancy turned seriously to acting.  She made her screen debut in 1916 in The Mill Owner's Daughter (also known as The Little Mayoress) where she played the lead.  Having grown up in the industry I'm sure she was aware that it was uncertain and very competitive, even with the name she had.  The same year as her movie debut, Nancy took the role of 'party guest' in The Boomerang, a hotly anticipated American comedy which required pretty girls as bit-part players.  I find it interesting that she also found a side hussle in costume, becoming friends with fellow actress and theatrical costumer, the amazingly-named Gladys Archbutt...

Gladys and Dog (c.1900)

Gladys was making a great living as an actress but either was a realist or just found her passion lay in costume as I found her through this advert...

In 1919, Gladys and 'E Lewis Waller' (presumably Edmund) opened a theatrical costume shop in Chandos Street which had exhibitions every Friday in the shop on a miniature stage. Both Gladys and Edmund were stakeholders and partners but a matter of months later, Gladys announced in the newspaper that she had other plans. In The Era in February 1920, Gladys reported she had severed all ties with the Chandos Street business and was sailing to New York to go into partnership with Nancy. By this point Nancy had inherited her father's money (payable either on marriage or her 21st birthday) and so with her money and dreams of film stardom, Nancy crossed the Atlantic and there met Horton Edward Pratt.

Horton had arrived from Australia as Horton Pfaff in 1920, changing his name to Pratt along the way. Six foot tall and no doubt handsome, Horton and Nancy fell in love.  She had been acting in films (un-named in the papers) but vowed to give it all up to become the wife of Horton Pratt, a merchant. It was mentioned throughout the newspapers that she had suddenly married this unknown man and cabled her news to home.  Nancy was described as a famous movie actress and her brother Edmund, merely the husband of another famous movie actress, his new wife Marie Blanche (aka Marie Peacock from Scarborough, also a daughter of an actor, William Peacock, who started on the stage as a child). I'm guessing it was entirely respectable and expected that Nancy would give up her acting and live the life of Mrs Pratt, and to be fair the couple travelled a fair amount in the 1920s (thank you to the passenger listings on Ancestry).  Mr and Mrs Pratt, who kept the same address in London as well as New York, travelled across the Atlantic, including a trip to Buenos Aires. In January 1929, on the Cunard ship Mauretania, Horton and Nancy travelled back to New York from Southampton.  However, in July Nancy returned alone.  Well, not quite alone as she had some interesting shipmates...

Yes, he looks like trouble...

Amongst the passengers of the White Star Line ship Adriatic sailing from New York to Liverpool in the summer of 1929 was George Pitt-Rivers.  As I work with archaeologists as my day job, I immediately recognised the name but he's a gitweasel. Good Lord, that's an understatement, as his Wikipedia page involves the phrase 'he always wore his golden swastika badge.' If Nancy had 'accidentally' thrown him overboard it would have been for the best.  Far more conducive to smooth seas was a fellow actor, sailing for one last visit to home before returning to Hollywood.  He's quite obscure, you probably haven't heard of him....

That's young Archibald Leach from Bristol.  I hope he made something of himself...

Poor old Nancy had returned a divorced woman almost a decade after retiring from acting, not the most forgiving of careers to return to as a thirty-something woman.  As actresses like Gabrielle Ray can testify, if you give up your seat at the acting table, there are around a dozen pretty young women ready to take it and it's a devil to get back.  Nancy had her surname, now reclaimed, to aid her, even if it is only to talk about her father. In 1933, a particularly sad report in the Daily News read: 

'Miss Nancy Lewis Waller...the only daughter of the late Mr Lewis Waller, the actor, asks us to state that a man of the same name who was brought from prison to give evidence in a recent High Court case has no connection to her father or her family.'

It is dubious whether or not in 1933 anyone would think of Lewis Waller, or if they did, not be familiar with the particulars of his family. I also think it is interesting that not only did Nancy shed her married name but also brought all her Father's name into hers, as if to keep the flame alive. Her name also appeared in conjunction with a funeral at Stratford Upon Avon, for the autograph-hunting Parish Clerk who had amassed a noteworthy collection that included Nancy, Ellen Terry and the Princess of Schleswig-Holstein.  Nancy slipped into obscurity, travelling again to America and within Europe but finally settling down on the south coast like her mother.  She died in 1972 in Worthing, West Sussex, over 20 years older than either of her parents managed and a decade more than her brother.

Nancy and her Dad (c.1912)

Nancy's life isn't exactly ground-breaking and she has a trajectory opposite to those I normally study.  Miss Waller was born into the limelight, her path to fame fairly well marked out for her.  Reporters hang on her every word aged 6, for goodness sake, but even then neither her or her brother attained the sort of fame either of their parents found. To be the child of a superstar must be incredibly hard in so many ways, even more these days because I could find not one report that implied Nancy got any of her fame merely through her connections. I think for the media Nancy was forever stuck as the little girl clutching the hand of a theatrical god and she never got to change the story.