- published: 19 Aug 2015
- views: 370
The Adelphi Theatre is a 1500-seat West End theatre, located on the Strand in the City of Westminster. The present building is the fourth on the site. The theatre has specialised in comedy and musical theatre, and today it is a receiving house for a variety of productions, including many musicals. The theatre was Grade II listed for historical preservation on 1 December 1987.
It was founded in 1806 as the Sans Pareil ("Without Compare"), by merchant John Scott, and his daughter Jane (1770–1839). Jane was a British theatre manager, performer, and playwright. Together, they gathered a theatrical company and by 1809 the theatre was licensed for musical entertainments, pantomime, and burletta. She wrote more than fifty stage pieces in an array of genres: melodramas, pantomimes, farces, comic operettas, historical dramas, and adaptations, as well as translations. Jane Scott retired to Surrey in 1819, marrying John Davies Middleton (1790–1867).
On 18 October 1819, the theatre reopened under its present name, which was adopted from the Adelphi Buildings opposite.
Grace Patricia Kelly (November 12, 1929 – September 14, 1982) was an American actress who, in April 1956, married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, to become Princess consort of Monaco, styled as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, and commonly referred to as Princess Grace.
After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of 20, Grace Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions as well as in more than forty episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, with the release of Mogambo, she became a movie star, a status confirmed in 1954 with a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award nomination as well as leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl, in which she gave a deglamorized, Academy Award-winning performance. She retired from acting at 26 to enter upon her duties in Monaco. She and Prince Rainier had three children: Caroline, Albert, and Stéphanie. She also retained her American roots, maintaining dual US and Monégasque citizenships.
Gemma Christina Arterton (born 12 January 1986) is an English actress. She played the eponymous protagonist in the BBC adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and starred in the feature films St Trinian's, the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Tamara Drewe. She was nominated for a BAFTA, in the Rising Star category.
Arterton was born in Gravesend, Kent, the elder daughter of Sally-Anne (née Heap), a cleaner, and Barry Arterton, a welder. Arterton was born with polydactyly, and was brought up, along with her sister, Hannah Jane, by their single mother, on a council estate in Gravesend. Arterton's parents divorced when she was five, and her father remarried in 1996. She attended Painters Ash Primary School in Northfleet, then attended Gravesend Grammar School for Girls on Pelham Road in Gravesend, she took a performance arts course at the Miskin Theatre in Dartford (part of North West Kent College) and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on a full grant.