Hubert Carter played many parts in Shakespeare’s plays and was active on the stage until 1931, three years before his death. His first stage appearance was in 1889 and his first London engagement was in 1895. In 1897, he played his first part in a London production of Shakespeare as Francisco in Hamlet.

He gained critical attention when he played with Ellen Terry in 1903 as Borachio in Much Ado About Nothing; after that he went on to score successes as Othello, Shylock, and Macbeth. During his career he appeared in more than twenty-five productions of Shakespeare; in addition, he toured various universities in the United States performing various Shakespearean parts in dramatic recitals.

Mantell was born in Scotland and first appeared on stage in Belfast, Northern Ireland; for a time he used the stage name Robert Hudson, but he reassumed his name Mantell after he joined the company of Helena Modjeska in 1878 and came to the United States. His first professional appearance was at the Theatre Royal in Rockdale in 1876. His first role with Dame Modjeska was as Tybalt in Hamlet at the Leyland Opera House in Albany, New York.

He returned to the UK, but met with little success and went back to the US permanently, where for years he toured with his own company. He was not particularly popular in New York City, so he toured other cities in the country. He was an indefatigable worker—something of a war horse—and he was constantly on the road with this troupe. One way for him to keep a leading actress with this kind of workload was to marry her, which he did four times. He married his last wife, actress Genevieve Hamper, thirty-four years his junior, until his death.

Over the years, Mantell played in Hamlet, Othello (as both Iago and Othello, alongside Hamper’s Desdemona), Romeo & Juliet (alongside Hamper), Richard III, King Lear (a role he especially enjoyed), Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and King John. Despite his failure to excite the critics and public in London and New York, he was a well-respected Shakespearean actor on the road. He also played in eight films between 1896 and 1923. Clarence J. Bulliet wrote his biography, Robert B. Mantell’s Romance, in 1918.

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.