Ellen Terry would become one of the greatest actresses of the Victorian stage. Her first marriage began when she was still sixteen.
Ellen was born in 1847 into a theatrical family and had been performing since childhood. Through artistic circles she met the celebrated painter George Frederic Watts.
On 20 February 1864 they married. Ellen was one week short of her seventeenth birthday. Watts was three days short of his forty-seventh.
There was almost thirty years between them.
Watts painted Ellen repeatedly, including the famous portrait 'Choosing'. A later legal document recorded that he hoped marriage would allow him to guide her artistic nature and remove her from what he saw as the dangers and temptations of the stage.
But the marriage was badly mismatched. They separated in 1865 and were eventually divorced in 1877.
Ellen returned to the stage and went on to become one of the most celebrated Shakespearean actresses of her age, particularly through her long professional partnership with Henry Irving.
Her romantic life remained unconventional, but Kent eventually gave her something more settled: a sanctuary.
In 1899 Ellen bought Smallhythe Place near Tenterden. She loved the house and garden and made it her home for the last decades of her life. She died there in 1928, aged eighty-one. Today Smallhythe Place preserves her extraordinary theatrical legacy.
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