Editorial: the actress-manager and early film

In the same way as the theatrical actress-manager in theatre history is yet to be associated with silent film, so too has film history yet to fully explore the idea of the theatrical actress undertaking managerial ‘work’ in the cinema. Hence, while traditional accounts of theatrical anachronism in early film have been replaced by feminist affirmations of theatrical agency and interdisciplinary exchange, we are yet to properly acknowledge the industrial importance and considerable commercial expertise the theatrical actress brought to early film. With this in mind, we ask: can early film be included in these discussions of women and nineteenth-century theatre? Can scholars whose work extends into the 1890s include that most portable of popular theatres – the silent film – in their research? Is it possible for discussions of women’s theatrical work to include the cinema, particularly when stage actresses entered film in the early twentieth century, bringing middle-class and female audiences with them? Might we expand the debate to include other countries, so that the ‘soft’ commerce of the nineteenth-century theatre is positioned as a global trade that helped define and develop modern reproductive industries such as the cinema? Conversely, what happens if we acknowledge the importance of theatre actresses not only to the visibility and appeal of the nascent cinema, but to the theatre’s global renown? The papers presented collectively explore the issues that emerge when we research in an interdisciplinary and intermedial way.