Lilian Baylis

Lilian Baylis ran the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells on almost no money and out of them came the National Theatre, English National Opera and the Royal Ballet. She was a musician's daughter who spent her youth in South Africa giving concerts and teaching, and came back in 1898 to help her aunt Emma Cons run the Royal Victoria Hall - a temperance music hall in Lambeth for working people, cheap and respectable. She took it over in 1912 and did something nobody expected: she staged all of Shakespeare's First Folio plays there by 1923, the first company anywhere to do it, at prices her audience could pay. She added opera in English, and then, because a young woman named Ninette de Valois came to teach movement to the actors and had a plan, ballet. She reopened Sadler's Wells in 1931 as a second house. Her methods were eccentric and well documented: she prayed for good box office, cooked on a gas ring in the wings, paid famously badly, and told John Gielgud he looked like a scarecrow. Everyone worked for her anyway. She was made a Companion of Honour and given an Oxford doctorate. She died suddenly in 1937, and the three national companies that came out of her theatres all date their founding to her. She had a facial paralysis from childhood illness that affected her speech and she never let it stop her speaking in public. Sadler s Wells Opera became English National Opera and Sadler s Wells Ballet became the Royal Ballet. The Old Vic company became the nucleus of the National Theatre under Olivier in 1963.

• Lived: 1874 CE – 1937 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: other