Evelyn Millard

Evelyn Mary Millard (18 September 1869 – 9 March 1941) was an English Shakespearean actress, actor-manager and "stage beauty" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perhaps best known for creating the role of Cecily Cardew in the 1895 premiere of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Millard was born in Kensington in London in 1869, one of three daughters of John Millard (1838 –1900), a teacher of elocution at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, and his wife, Emily (née Cooke) (1848–1902). Evelyn Millard studied at the Female School of Art in Bloomsbury. She made her first stage appearance in 1891 in a "walk-on" role in Henry Arthur Jones' play The Dancing Girl at the Haymarket Theatre in London. She trained as an actress under Sarah Thorne at her School of Acting based at the Theatre Royal in Margate, where she learnt "voice production, gesture and mime, dialects and accents, make-up, the portrayal of characters, the value of pace and the value of pauses". For Thorne she played Julia in The Hunchback, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. She then joined Thomas Thorne's company, and toured in the plays Joseph's Sweetheart, Miss Tomboy, Sophia and Money. Millard then spent almost two years at the Adelphi Theatre in London.

In 1894 Millard toured with George Alexander, for whom she played Rosamund in Sowing the Wind, Dulcie in The Masqueraders and Paula in The Second Mrs Tanqueray; she also played the latter role at the St James's Theatre. At this theatre she created the role of Cecily Cardew in the 1895 premiere of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. In September 1895 Millard appeared before Queen Victoria in a Royal Command Performance of Liberty Hall at Balmoral.

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