Baliol Holloway, forgotten Shakespearean actor

Baliol Blount Holloway (1883-1967), actor, known as ‘Bay’ or ‘Ba’, was born on 28 February 1883 in Brentwood, Billericay, second son of Thomas Henry Holloway (b.1833), a retired wine merchant, and only son of Emma Harriet Jordan (1853-1895). Thomas had previously married Elizabeth Stratton (1836-1880), mother of Baliol’s half-brother Wilfred Stratton Holloway (b.1873).

Holloway was a prominent classical actor between the wars. The critic J.C. Trewin said he ‘once or twice touched greatness’ and ‘probably did as much as any man for the British classical theatre.’ He was a notable Bensonian, along with Dorothy Green, with whom he starred at Stratford, during the 1920s Shakespeare revival.

Educated at Denstone College, Staffordshire, Holloway began acting aged 15, as Herman Vezin’s pupil. Linked from the start with the lavish Victorian style, his first performance was Solanio in The Merchant of Venice in 1899. Holloway subsequently worked with touring repertory companies. He joined the Benson Company in 1907 (Benson had been Vezin’s pupil), the Liverpool Repertory Theatre (1912), the Granville Barker Repertory Company at St James’s Theatre (1913), and the Savoy Theatre (1914), appearing in Androcles and the Lion. A review in Liverpool said he ‘helped the team considerably in its romantic efforts.’ His first London appearance was Jacques Barzinovsky in The Man and his Picture at the Great Queen Street Theatre. In 1914 he was in Henry V before serving ‘with the guns’.  He married Emily Baker in 1908.

After the war he was one of Frank Benson’s leading actors at Stratford, eventually playing parts in all but one of Shakespeare’s plays. Benson had acted with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, who returned to the Shakespeare text of Richard III (ditching Cibber’s version), restored the final act of The Merchant of Venice, and produced less popular plays like Cymbeline. Benson continued this originalism with Shakespeare tours and at the Stratford festival, first established in 1879.

In 1920 Holloway joined the first permanent company at Stratford, forerunner of The Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by William Bridge-Adams, who produced Shakespeare uncut, including the first full-text Hamlet at Stratford, in a move away from star-led productions. Holloway was seen as a pillar of the Stratford Shakespeare revival. Bridge-Adams put on six plays after five weeks’ rehearsal in his first season, and Holloway was often stretched too thin, playing a dozen major parts a year. During the 1920s Holloway and Dorothy Green ‘were at the centre of an enthusiastic cult’ in Stratford. (Jenkins, Downshire Hill, p. 124)

Holloway co-starred in the 1925-26 Old Vic season that made Edith Evans a star. When Evans moved to the Old Vic, ‘Nearly everyone thought I was mad.’ Herbert Farjeon reassured her, not least because Holloway ‘makes Elizabethan plays “go along” – a wind that bellies out the sails.’ After Holloway’s death, a letter appeared in The Stage recalling a 1920s Old Vic production. Before the curtain went up, a message appeared that the lead actor was ill and Baliol Holloway, just back from America, would play the protagonist without rehearsal. 

‘Anticipation was high for a sight of our old favourite and when the curtain rose on the second scene out there stood our Baliol… the house rose with a mighty roar of applause. Feet stamped, cheers rose. After 40 years... I have never experienced such a spontaneous gesture of affection and appreciation for a favourite actor.’ (The Stage, 27 April 1967)

In 1929 he pursued his dream of a company that produced classic theatre without financial restraint. John Counsell asked Brendon Bracken to invest. Bracken replied ‘All the men I know who back plays are either mad or want whores.’ Holloway eventually got funding for a less lavish company at the New Theatre. 

The first production, Richard III, had a rocky start. The stage manager, Casper Middleton, was badly organised. The dress rehearsal was chaotic. (Counsell, p. 33-34) Despite this, the production was a huge success. Holloway’s Richard III was ‘Parallel to Mr. John Gielgud’s Hamlet… one of the most remarkable Shakespeare creations of latter years.’ (The Illustrated London News, 20 September 1930) He subsequently appeared in Restoration comedies, memorably at the Ambassador’s Theatre in 1932-33. Bridge-Adams thought Holloway re-created Restoration parts for his time. Despite this, he never achieved star status on the West End. The novelist Elizabeth Jenkins recalled ‘the gnawing misery of an actor who has a following and a well-founded confidence in his own powers, but sees the steadily ebbing tide.’ (Jenkins, Downshire Hill, p. 125)

Bernard Miles wrote in The Times after Holloway died, ‘he embodied Hazlitt’s dictum that the first quality of a player must be a strong spirit of enjoyment within himself.’  (He was a memorable Falstaff despite being, in Trewin’s words, a ‘taut, spare greyhound of an actor’.) That spirit was evident in his capability as a mimic, his readings of Dickens, and his bon mots, like his description of Frank Benson’s uneven performances: ‘He always gave his best performances on a Tuesday night, usually in somewhere like Peterborough.’ He said of the new Memorial Theatre in 1934, ‘On a clear day you can just about see the boiled shirts in the front row. It is like acting to Calais from the Cliffs of Dover.’

Holloway was a powerful performer. Herbert Farjeon said he could act with his fingernails. Like Benson, Holloway’s style was slow. He pronounced vowels as Irving had, ‘war’ rhyming with ‘star’, ‘chop’ sounding like ‘charp’. (Holloway had seen Irving in The Bells.) Jenkins said his ‘inimitable voice’ reminded you of ‘the echo of waves sweeping into a cavern.’ (Jenkins, p. 124) J.C. Trewin said Holloway would ‘pause as long as any classical actor I remember’. He found it ‘curiously impressive.’ Not everyone agreed. In the late 1920s, an Old Vic company found him astonishingly slow. (Williams, p. 59) James Agate found him infuriating: ‘he persists in cutting up every speech into granulated nodules’. Agate was however lifted out of his seat at the end of Holloway’s Richard III and Othello. 

Holloway’s career stalled after World War Two. In 1946 Barry Jackson (who staged the first modern dress Shakespeare productions) took over Stratford, refusing to employ the old guard. The classical style was out. This caused lasting bitterness. 1949 saw Holloway’s final Old Vic performance. Elizabeth Jenkins tried to help, writing Holloway a play about the Duke of Monmouth. Battle Royale played to a full house at Windsor, but to no avail. It was later broadcast on BBC radio as King Monmouth. Holloway’s voice was impressive, and he appeared in a range of radio productions. Donald Sinden tried to get him cast as the voice of God in a 1960 Archibald MacLeash play, but it went to Sir Ralph Richardson.

Holloway’s strength and weakness was that he could play a huge number of parts every season. His background involved little rehearsal. Later on, this meant his detractors found him ‘predictable, stale, and operatic’. (Beauman, p. 87) Bridge-Adams, a lifelong admirer of Holloway’s arch Edwardian style, ‘the real bag of tricks’, wrote that Holloway ‘lost because he was alienated from London as a Ham.’ As late as 1938, Gielgud wrote to Holloway lamenting the lack of rehearsals at Stratford and sympathising with him about the gap between the old generation of Shakespeareans and new actors. Gielgud wouldn’t work there unless rehearsals were improved and the stage was changed. (Gielgud, pp. 48-9) Part of Holloway’s problem, also, was his flat refusal to compromise. His dedication to the classics was so pronounced that his dogs were named after classic characters, including a fox terrier called Tony Lumpkin who walked with Holloway from Marylebone to the West End twice a day whenever Holloway was in a play. 

Holloway had an eighteen-year retirement, never appearing on television, forgotten to the new generation. He would tell the story of a young radio producer, auditioning him for a senator in Othello, unaware that the old actor had once been acclaimed as Othello himself. Emily died in 1959 and Baliol gradually degenerated into a sad state of disarray. Elizabeth Jenkins called him a ‘terrifying monster, always dissatisfied and cussing bitterly.’ She spent hours looking after him every day. Eventually she was relieved from her duties after fainting from exhaustion in the interval of The Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House. (Jenkins to Gollancz, 8 December 1965)

He was a friend and supporter to young actors. He taught Donald Sinden how to master an aside. ‘You must crack your head round in one clean movement, look straight at the occupant of the seat, deliver the line and crack your head back to where it was before. The voice you use must be different from the one you are using in the play. If loud, then soft… if high, then low.’ (Sinden, p. 164) Holloway once said to Sinden: ‘Look, Don, you are playing at the Haymarket, aren’t you? That’s a theatre that is all gilt. Gilt round the boxes, gilt round the circle, gilt on the ceiling. When a great actor walks on the stage – it lights up.’ (The Stage, 24 January 2002)

Holloway died at home on 15 April 1967. The memorial service was at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, 28 April 1967. Shakespearean actor Donald Wolfit gave the address. Donald Sinden read the Lesson. Gilbert and Sullivan was sung. The actor Nora Nicholson said, ‘Not many of us wore black, for this was not a mournful occasion.’ He had been estranged from Edith Evans for a long time, his bitterness towards her intensified by her successful and his relative failure. She attended the memorial service, looking ‘pale and distraught.’ (Jenkins, p. 129)

He had been a bridge between the lavish nineteenth century and naturalistic twentieth, representing the classical tradition and the 1920s Shakespeare revival. 

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I wrote this profile in the style of an Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. They are not currently interested in publishing it, nor does Holloway have a Wikipedia page, but it seems obvious to me that Holloway deserves to be remembered more than he is. If anyone has any other information about him, please do share it in the comments, especially if you know anything about his elusive wife, Emily.

(Not all of this archival material has been available to view recently, but hopefully more will be accessible as covid recedes.)

UPDATE: The text of this page is available for modification and reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License.

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Likenesses
Crowther, bromide print, 1921-1930, NPG

Wealth at Death: 7168 - 15 - 0: probate, 26 May 1967

Sources

Documents
b. cert
Marriage register

Newspapers
The Times, 16 April 1967
The Times, 22 April 1967
Telegraph, 17 April 1967
Sunday Telegraph, 16 April 1967
Birmingham Daily Post, Saturday 22 April 1967
Birmingham Daily Post, Saturday 02 June 1979
Leicester Chronicle, Saturday 02 August 1919
The Era, Saturday 15 April 1905
The Era, Saturday 05 June 1909
The Illustrated London News, 20 September 130
The Illustrated London News, 8 November 1958
The Illustrated London News, 28 January 1961
The Stage, Thursday 04 May 1967
The Stage, Thursday 20 April 1967
The Stage, 24 January 2002

Books
A Bridge-Adams Letter Book, ed. by Robert Speaight (1871)
Sally Beauman, Stratford Memorial Theatre (1982)
Bryan Forbes, Ned’s Girl (1977)
Donald Sinden, Laughter in the Second Act (1985)
Elizabeth Jenkins, The View from Downshire Hill (2005)
Harcourt Williams, Four Years at the Old Vic (1935)
J.C. Trewin, Edith Evans (1954)
John Counsell, Counsell’s Opinion (1963)
Paul Oldfield, Victoria Crosses on the Western Front, 31st July 1917–6th November 1917 (2016)
Sir John Gielgud, A Life in Letters ed. by Richard Mangan (2004)Who Was Who

Archives
Warwick, Gollancz archive, letters from Elizabeth Jenkins to Victor Gollancz
University of Bristol, Theatre Collection
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
BBC archives
British Film Institute