Mary Brough

Mary Bessie Brough (16 April 1863 – 30 September 1934) was an English actress in theatre, silent films and early talkies, including eleven of the twelve Aldwych farces of the 1920s and early 1930s.

The daughter of a well-known actor, Lionel Brough, with a long theatrical family tradition, she became a professional actress in December 1881. Although she was in regular demand in character parts she did not become well known to theatre-goers until she was nearly sixty. In 1922 she was cast in a small part in a farce, Tons of Money, which was followed by a ten-year series of new farces at the Aldwych Theatre for which the actor-manager Tom Walls assembled a regular company of players, including Brough. The playwright Ben Travers wrote parts expressly to suit her persona; she recorded several of them in films of the farces.

Brough was born in London, the eldest daughter of the actor Lionel Brough and his wife Margaret, née Simpson. The family's stage traditions extended well beyond her father. The Times said of Mary Brough, "she was a granddaughter of one dramatist, the niece of two others and the first cousin of several men and women of the theatre, of whom the best remembered is Miss Fanny Brough."

Brough made her stage debut on the same day and in the same production as Lillie Langtry: She Stoops to Conquer at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Lionel Brough played Tony Lumpkin; his daughter played the unnamed maid. She worked for leading managements, including those of J. L. Toole, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Charles Frohman and Cyril Maude. Her roles varied from the classics to new light comedies, and the popular melodramas at Drury Lane. Her only Shakespearean part was Mistress Quickly in Henry IV, Part 1 (1914); she played in two Dickens dramatisations, as Clara Peggoty in David Copperfield and Mrs Bedwin in Oliver Twist (both 1915).

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