The Beginning and the End

Dennis King was born Dennis Pratt. His brother, my late father, kept a scrapbook of his rise to fame in the States. He started it with a photo of Dennis in the film version of The Vagabond King. More about that and the other contents later.

I will begin with the obituary pictured here. It must have been slipped into the scrapbook by my mother as my father predeceased Dennis. What can be gleaned from it? Before rereading it I had forgotten Dennis's wife's maiden name. In the family she was known as "Billie" as far as I can remember so "Edith Wright" came as a surprise.

What is the first thing we do now with such facts? We feed them in to Google and check the results. I was surprised to find that the combination of "Edith Wright" and "Dennis King" produced less than 20 matches and one of them showed that they had appeared together in Monsieur Beaucaire at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh from 22 March 1920 until 27 March 1920.

1920 in Edinburgh was not the first performance of Monsieur Beaucaire, 1919 in London preceded it. I do not yet know if Edith toured with Dennis but I like to think that this was the production that brought them together.