Talking of Edinburgh

In a cutting from the Daily Mail, actress Miss Evelyn Laye explains that she met Dennis King when they were very young in Edinburgh and over a cup of coffee they vowed to each other that they would become stars. It is highly likely that this was in 1920 when Dennis, who was appearing in Monsieur Beaucaire, was 22 years old*.

They went as far as making a bet on who would reach the top first and when meeting up years later Evelyn had to concede defeat because Dennis had already made his first talking picture.

Although the scrapbook cutting is undated it was probably published around 1930 when Dennis was in London appearing as d'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers.

* It turns out that Evelyn Laye and Dennis were in a musical together in Edinburgh, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, three years before this! The production was "Oh Caesar!" and it ran from 23rd December 1916 to 20th January 1917. Evelyn was right, they were young, Dennis had just turned 19. I might have missed this because Dennis's name appears as "Denis King" in Glasgow University's online catalogue. As we will see in a later post this follows on neatly from his last appearance on stage at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

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.