Harley Granville-Barker (Playwright) was born in London in 1877. He began his stage career on tour, performing with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, before he made his first London appearance in 1892. He was only twenty-three when George Bernard Shaw in 1900 cast him as Eugene Marchbanks in CANDIDA, from which there grew a fifteen-year professional and personal relationship so binding that many came to believe Barker was Shaw’s illegitimate son. He joined forces with the manager John E. Vedrenne to found the Court Theatre, London, in 1904 which was to become the first modern repertory theatre in the English-speaking world.

Granville-Barker’s best known plays are THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE, WASTE and MADRAS HOUSE. As a stage director he introduced to the London stage plays by Galsworthy, Masefield, Maeterlinck, Schnitzler, Hauptmann.  As an actor he was acclaimed for his Shaw interpretations, creating the roles of John Tanner, Frank Gardner, Adolphus Cusins, and Louis Dubedat, and appearing successfully as well in such parts as General Burgoyne, Major Sergius Saranoff, and Mr. Valentine.

He was one of the foremost champions of a national theatre for Great Britain, and the first to call for a subsidized theatre. His stagings in 1912 of THE WINTER’S TALE and TWELFTH NIGHT revolutionized Shakespearean production in the modern theatre through their concentration on stripped-down productions and analytical probing of character.

In later years, his greatest achievements were the Prefaces to Shakespeare, recognized as among the finest contributions to Shakespearean criticism. Barker was 68 at his death in Paris on August 31, 1946, at which time Shaw recalled him as “altogether the most distinguished and incomparably the most cultivated person whom circumstances had driven into the theatre.”