ABSTRACT
It is difficult to talk of Harriet Lee (1757–1851) without including her elder sister and often collaborator, Sophia (1750–1824). They were two of five daughters born to the actor-manager John Lee who played all the major theatres between 1745 and 1780. Quoting Cooke’s assessment of the actor in the Life of Macklin, Genest paints the picture of a more than competent actor:
Lee’s Iago was very respectable, and showed a good judgment and thorough representation of the character—this actor was not without considerable pretensions, were they not more allayed by his vanity—he had a good person, a good voice, and a more than ordinary knowledge in his profession, which he sometimes showed without exaggeration; but he wanted to be placed in the chair of Garrick, and in attempting to reach this he often deranged his natural abilities—he was for ever, as Foote said, “doing the honours of his face”—he affected uncommon long pauses, and frequently took such out-of-the-way pains with emphasis and articulation, that the natural actor seldom appeared. (6: 165–166)
Summers reports that during his management of the theatre at Bath (1778–1779) “he sustained many important roles with great applause” (164) usually playing opposite Sarah Siddons, the “eighteenth-century’s greatest English actress” (Richards 73). 1 Less successful were his attempts at play writing or, rather, adaptations of the classics which Summers calls “flat and insipid to the last degree” (164).