Elizabeth Barry

Elizabeth Barry (1658 – 7 November 1713) was an English actress of the Restoration period.

She worked in big, prestigious London theatre companies throughout her successful career: from 1675 in the Duke's Company, 1682 – 1695 in the monopoly United Company, and from 1695 onwards as a member of the actors' cooperative usually known as Betterton's Company, of which she was one of the original shareholders. Her stage career began 15 years after the first-ever professional actresses had replaced Shakespeare's boy heroines on the London stage.

The actor Thomas Betterton said that her acting gave "success to plays that would disgust the most patient reader", and the critic and playwright John Dennis described her as "that incomparable Actress changing like Nature which she represents, from Passion to Passion, from Extream to Extream, with piercing Force and with easy Grace".

A frequently repeated anecdote holds that the 17-year-old Barry at first performed so unskillfully that she was fired from the company several times, but was transformed into a brilliant actress by the coaching of her lover, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. While multiple sources confirm that Rochester was Barry's lover, the only source for the coaching story is a Life of Barry published in 1740 – 65 years after the events – by Edmund Curll, well known for his fanciful and inaccurate biographies.

Barry was a successful comedian who created a variety of Restoration comedy heroines throughout her career, but her greatest impact on Restoration drama was as a tragic actress. Her capacity for projecting pathos was an inspiration to playwrights Thomas Otway and Thomas Southerne in the three famous tragic roles they wrote for her: Monimia in Otway's The Orphan (1680), Belvidera in Otway's Venice Preserved (1682), and Isabella in Southerne's The Fatal Marriage (1694). These three roles, wrote the prompter John Downes, "gain'd her the Name of Famous Mrs. Barry, both at Court and City, for when ever She Acted any of these three Parts, she forc'd Tears from the Eyes of her Auditory, especially those who have any Sense of Pity for the Distress't."

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