Actors - Lillie Langtry

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	Actors - Lillie Langtry

Lillie Langtry (née Emilie Charlotte Le Breton, nicknamed the Jersey Lily) (13 October 1853 – 12 February 1929) was a British actress born on the island of Jersey in 1853.

Emilie Le Breton was the only daughter of the Dean of Jersey, Rev. William Corbet le Breton, having six brothers. She was educated by a French governess, her brothers' tutor.

Marriage

In 1874, Emilie married Irish landowner Edward Langtry. One of her attractions to him was the fact that he possessed a yacht, and she insisted that he take her away from the Channel Islands; eventually they set up home in London. She did not begin her stage career until several years later, after her husband became bankrupt.

Relationships, Affairs, Scandals

Lille Langtry was, throughout her marriage, unfaithful. She had many notable lovers, most prominent and well connected men of the time.

She had a daughter, born in 1881 (Jeanne Marie Langtry), who later married Sir Ian Malcolm of Poltalloch in 1902. Her daughter and her husband had four children. Jeanne died in 1964. Jeanne's father was definitely not Lillie's husband. The child's actual father was reportedly Lillie Langtry's extra-marital lover at the time, Prince Louis of Battenberg (later 1st Marquess of Milford Haven, 1854–1921), who married Princess Victoria of Hesse and the Rhine in 1884 and became father of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who became the last Viceroy of India (and great-uncle of Prince Charles) and grandfather of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

A recent biography of Langtry suggests that another of her extra-marital lovers, Arthur Jones, may have been Jeanne Marie's father, although Prince Louis's son, Lord Mountbatten, always maintained that his father was the one.

Langtry's heyday as a society beauty culminated in her becoming a semi-official mistress to the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria's son Albert Edward ("Bertie"), the future king Edward VII.

Other lovers included wealthy Britons Robert Peel and George Baird.

Among her friends were the Irish writer Oscar Wilde and the American artist James McNeill Whistler. She was for a time the manager of the Imperial Theatre and also manufactured claret at her 4,200 acre (17 km²) winery in Lake County (northern) California, which she purchased in 1888 and sold in 1906.

American Citizenship and After

In 1887, Lillie became an American citizen, and divorced her husband the same year in California. In 1899, she married the much younger Hugo Gerald de Bathe, who would inherit a baronetcy, and became a leading owner in the horse-racing world, before retiring to Monte Carlo. She died there in 1929, and was buried in the graveyard of St. Saviour's Church in Jersey – the church of which her father had been rector.

Cultural influence

Her nickname, "The Jersey Lily", was taken from the Jersey lily flower (Amaryllis belladonna) – a symbol of Jersey. The nickname was popularised by a portrait of Lillie Langtry, entitled A Jersey Lily, painted by Sir John Everett Millais, a fellow-countryman (according to tradition, they spoke Jèrriais to each other during the sittings).

The painting caused great interest when exhibited at the Royal Academy, but Lillie is holding a Guernsey lily (Nerine sarniensis) in the painting rather than a Jersey lily, as no Jersey lilies were available at Covent Garden during the sittings.

Besides sitting for Millais, Frank Miles and Sir Edward Poynter, she is also depicted in works by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

She used her high public profile to endorse commercial products such as cosmetics and soap, becoming an early example of celebrity endorsement.

Lillie Langtry's story was dramatised by London Weekend Television in 1978 as Lillie, with Francesca Annis in the title role. Annis had previously played Langtry in an episode of ATV's Edward VII. She was also portrayed on film by Lillian Bond in the film The Westerner
, and by Ava Gardner in the 1972 movie The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.

A heavily fictionalized incarnation of Langtry was performed by Stacy Haiduk in the 1996 television series Kindred: The Embraced
. In the series, Langtry is the immortal leader of a sect of vampires living in the present day.

Langtry is also a featured character in the tongue-in-cheek western novel, Slocum and the Jersey Lily by Jake Logan.

Places connected with Lillie Langtry

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