Mary Anne Keeley

Mary Anne Keeley, née Goward (22 November 1805 – 12 March 1899) was an English actress and actor-manager.

Mary Ann Goward was born at Ipswich, her father was a brazier and tinman. Her sister Sarah Judith Goward was the mother of Lydia Foote.

Goward's singing talents were noticed by the Ipswich writer Elizabeth Cobbold and she encouraged her to take to the stage. After some experience in the provinces, she first appeared on the stage in London on July 2, 1825, in the opera Rosina. It was not long before she gave up singing parts in favour of drama proper, where her powers of character-acting could have scope.

In June 1829 she married Robert Keeley (1793-1869), an admirable comedian, with whom she had often appeared. Between 1832 and 1842 they acted at Covent Garden, at the Adelphi with John Buckstone, at the Olympic with Charles Mathews, and at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane with William Charles Macready. In 1836 they visited America. In 1838 she made her first great success as Nydia, the blind girl, in a dramatized version of Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii, and followed this with an equally striking impersonation of Smike in Nicholas Nickleby.

In 1839 came her decisive triumph with her picturesque and spirited acting as the hero of a play founded upon Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard. So dangerous was considered the popularity of the play, with its glorification of the prison-breaking felon, that the Lord Chamberlain ultimately forbade the performance of any piece upon the subject. It is perhaps mainly as Jack Sheppard that Keeley lived in the memory of playgoers, despite her long subsequent career in plays more worthy of her remarkable gifts.

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