Henry Ainley was born in Leeds on August 21, 1879. He acted in literally hundreds of productions, but he began his career as an amateur. He joined Frank Benson‘s company and made his debut as a messenger in Macbeth. He later played with Herbert Beerbohm Tree‘s company as well. He played major parts in many Shakespeare plays, beginning with Henry V in 1900 and ending with As You Like it in 1936. He played Hamlet in 1930 at the Haymarket Theatre, London, a production that was chosen for a Royal Command Performance.

Beginning in 1915, Ainley played in several films, but the stage was his real home, where he performed in one of the Shakespeare plays almost annually in a busy career that spanned four decades. He died on October 13, 1945.

Ernest George Harcourt Williams began his career, like so many other Shakespearean actors, with Sir Frank Benson and first appeared in London in 1900 with Benson’s company. He married another player, Jean Sterling Mackinlay in 1908, and although his professional life was interrupted by World War I, he was associated with a number of fine actors and successful managers, among them George Alexander, H. B. Irving, Dame Ellen Terry, and, of course, Frank Benson. From 1929 until 1934 he was a producer at the Old Vic Theatre, where his Shakespeare presentations eventually won him high praise as he moved away from the Victorian and Edwardian concepts of Shakespeare’s plays towards more modern and controversial stagings. In 1935 he published Four Years at the Old Vic, a volume of his memoirs.

Williams also played in a number of films, all told twenty between 1944 and 1956. Of particular interest to us are two Shakespeare films; he played King Charles VI of France in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 production of Henry V and the First Player in Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet.