Tyrone Power (1795-1841)

Tyrone Power
Tyrone Power, c. 1840
Born	William Grattan Tyrone Power 1795 Kilmacthomas, County Waterford, Ireland
Died	17 March 1841
Spouse(s)	Anne Gilbert

William Grattan Tyrone Power (1795 – 17 March 1841), known professionally as Tyrone Power, was an Irish stage actor, comedian, author and theatrical manager. He was an ancestor of actor Tyrone Power and is also referred to as Tyrone Power I.

Born in Kilmacthomas, County Waterford, Ireland, to a landed family, the son of Maria Maxwell and Tyrone Power, he took to the stage achieving prominence throughout the world as an actor and manager.

He was well known for acting in such Irish-themed plays as Catherine Gore's King O'Neil (1835), his own St. Patrick's Eve (1837), Samuel Lover's Rory O'More (1837) and The White Horse of the Peppers (1838), Anna Marie Hall's The Groves of Blarney (1838), Eugene Macarthy's Charles O'Malley (1838), and Bayle Bernard's His Last Legs (1839) and The Irish Attorney (1840). In his discussion of these works, Richard Allen Cave has argued that Power, both in his acting as well as his choice of plays, sought to rehabilitate the Irishman from the derogatory associations with "stage Irishmen" ("Staging the Irishman" in Acts of Supremacy [1991]).

He had a number of notable descendants by his wife Anne, daughter of John Gilbert Esq. of the Isle of Wight: Anne Power is buried in the churchyard of St Mary The Virgin Church in High Halden, Kent UK.

Tyrone Power was lost at sea in March 1841, when the SS President disappeared without trace in the North Atlantic.