At the same time, her career was subjected, early on, to two major interruptions. At the age of 17 she misguidedly married the painter G.F. Watts, a gloomy figure well over twice her age. Then, after they had split up, she went to live in the country with a man she was passionately in love with, the architect and stage designer Edwin Godwin. (It was Godwin who was the father of her children.) They, too, eventually separated, but by this time she had taken up acting again.

Irving's start in life was very different. A poor boy, he spent much of his childhood in a remote Cornish village. A few fleeting contacts with the stage once he had moved to London made him set his heart on becoming an actor, but the odds seemed heavily against him. His ­chapel-going parents utterly disapproved, he had no money, and he suffered from a stammer that took him years to conquer.

He was also thin and ungainly. Even at the height of his fame he was to remain notorious for his dragging gait: the critic William Archer once said that when he walked across the stage he looked as though he was trying to run across a ploughed field.

He was undeterred, however. He gave up his job as a clerk and got what theatrical work he could, most of it in the provinces. A few judges (George Eliot, for example) responded to his intensity and took the measure of his talent early on, but most playgoers were initially more aware of his oddities - not only the awkward movements but also his jerky delivery and elongated vowels, which were probably a relic of his stammer. It was not until he was well into his 30s that he had his popular breakthrough.