Harley Granville-Barker

British playwright / director Harley Granville-Barker was born in London, England, in 1877. His schooling ended at age 13, when at the urging of his mother he entered a dramatic school / stock company at Margate. A year later he was performing on the London stage.

He was writing plays at a very young age, and in 1899 had his first play produced on the London stage, "The Weather Hen". He soon joined the Stage Society as an actor and producer.

In 1901 his play "The Marrying of Ann Leete" was produced on stage, to wide acclaim.

In 1905 he became co-manager of The Court Theatre, He began to stage plays by authors who had a difficult time finding theaters that would showcase their works, such as Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, and in fact Barker himself performed the lead in many of the Shaw plays they staged.

In 1907 he married Lillah McCarthy, an actress who had appeared in many of his productions, but they divorced in 1918. He then married Helen Mancheseter Gates, an American poet and novelist who later changed her professional name to Helen Granville-Barker.

He decided to leave acting in 1910, but stayed in the theatrical business as a producer until 1934. Barker is best known as a producer and director of plays by 'William Shakespare (I)', and in fact is considered by many Shakespeare devotees as the most important director of Shakespeare's plays in British theatrical history. He also translated the works of many foreign playwrights--many of them Spanish--into English, and wrote several scholarly books on drama and the theater.