Dan Leno:
Dan Leno was among the funniest and the most loved of comedians of the Victorian Music Hall, one whose career formed a bridge between the pantomime clowning of Joe Grimaldi in the early 19th century and the era of motion pictures.
“Ah! What is man? Wherefore does he why? Whence did he whence? Whither is he withering?”
Dan Leno
‘No actor of our time deserved immortality as well as he’
Sir Max Beerbohm
‘It seemed miraculous how Dan Leno contrived to make you see before you the imaginary persons with whom he conversed. He never stepped outside himself, never imitated the voices of his interlocutors. He merely repeated … a few words of what they were supposed to have said to him. Yet there they were, large as life, before us…. Never was there a more perfect technique in acting.’
Sir Max Beerbohm
‘He could hardly walk, and certainly never dance, without raising a smile, but he had a hundred different ways of walking and dancing, each appropriate to the person he was representing.’
The Times
“Here was a man unlike anyone else we had ever seen. That face so tragic, with all the tragedy that is writ on the face of a baby monkey, yet ever liable to relax it’s mouth into a sudden wide grin and to screw up it’s eyes to vanishing point over some little triumph wrested from fate.”
Sir Max Beerbohm
Joseph Grimaldi
(18 December 1778 – 31 May 1837)
Known as ‘The most celebrated of English clowns’, credited with being ‘the first white-face clown’. Joseph Grimaldi’s performances made the Clown the central character in the English Harlequinades.
Richard Findlater (Kenneth Bruce Findlater Bain)
(1921 – 1985)
English theatre critic and historian.
One of Britain’s most respected writers on the theatre. His drama criticism for a number of publications, and for the BBC, was admired inside and outside the profession. As well as biographies of such luminaries as Redgrave, Ashcroft, Olivier, Richardson, Lillian Baylis, and the clown Grimaldi, his eighteen books include a definitive history of stage censorship, Banned, and an account of contemporary British Theatre, The Unholy Trade, which made his name. He edited the arts pages of the Observer newspaper, and became its assistant editor in 1963.
Welcome to The Dan Leno Project.
Dan Leno was one of the great music hall and pantomime stars of the Victorian era (many would say ‘the greatest’.)
This project has been set up to follow restoration of recently discovered material relating to Dan Leno, which has led to a proposed new documentary about his life and legacy.
Follow the project as it develops, with all the latest news appearing on this web-site.