Florence Balcombe

Florence Balcombe
Balcombe in November 1880
Born	Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe (1858-07-17)17 July 1858 Newcastle, County Down, Ireland
Died	25 May 1937(1937-05-25) (aged 78) Knightsbridge, London
Spouse(s)	Bram Stoker (m. 1878–1912; his death)
Children	Irving Noel Thornley Stoker
Parent(s)	James Balcombe (father) Phillippa Anne Marshall (mother)

Florence Balcombe (17 July 1858 – 25 May 1937) was the wife and literary executor of Bram Stoker. She is remembered for her legal dispute with the makers of Nosferatu, a film based on Stoker's novel Dracula.

She was the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe of 1 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, and of Phillippa Anne Marshall, and was a celebrated beauty whose former suitor was Oscar Wilde. She married Stoker in Dublin in 1878. He had known Wilde from their student days, and had proposed Wilde for membership of the university’s Philosophical Society while he was president. Wilde was upset at Florence's decision, but Stoker later resumed the acquaintanceship and after Wilde's fall visited him on the Continent.

The Stokers moved to London, where he became acting-manager and then business manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre, London, a post he held for 27 years. Their only child was born on 31 December 1879 and christened Irving Noel Thornley Stoker,

Florence Balcombe outlived her husband by 25 years and died in 1937 at the age of 78. She was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, and her ashes scattered at the Gardens of Rest there. The original plan had been to keep her ashes and those of her husband together in a display urn. After Irving Noel Stoker's death in 1961, his ashes were added to those of his father's in that urn.

Balcombe is remembered for her legal dispute with the makers of the 1922 horror film Nosferatu, which was based without attribution or permission on Stoker's novel Dracula. She was unaware of the existence of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu until she received an anonymous letter from Berlin. The document included the program of a lavish cinematic event held in 1922, complete with full orchestral accompaniment, that had taken place in the Marble Garden at Berlin Zoological Garden. The German film was described in the handbill as "freely adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula." (Nosferatu screenwriter Henrik Galeen had changed the names of the main characters and made some liberal changes to certain key points. However, the resemblance to Stoker's novel is unmistakable.)