Mrs Constance Benson Shakespeare Edwardian Actress Hand Signed Postcard

PFAS203  This is an original antique hand signed postcard for Constance Benson historic Shakespeare 1900s actress who has personally autographed the souvenir where her signature rests perfectly accompanying her portrait with just corner impressions to allow which would almost surely seem from former album storage one is bigger than others, also a little ageing, otherwise great condition otherwise very good plus grading with undedicated autograph and this has such character franked 1902 so surely one of the earliest signed autographs of the actress you will find.

Gertrude Constance Cockburn Benson (nÔøΩe Samwell; 26 February 1864 19 January 1946) was a British stage and film actress. She married the actor Frank Benson on 24 July 1886, and they had two children, Eric William (18871916), killed at the battle of the Somme, and Brynhild Lucy (18881974).

As an actress, Constance Benson worked in the theatre. Still in 1911 she also appeared in leading roles in four silent films, all adaptations of William Shakespeare plays: Richard III, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and The Taming of the Shrew

In 1916 Constance became Lady Benson. After F. R. Benson's love affair with the young actress Genevieve Townsend (d. 1927), the couple separated but did not divorce, and in 1940 Benson attended her husband's funeral as his widow.

In the 1920s, Benson became a writer, and her published books are her autobiography Mainly Players (1926); two novels, The Chimera (1928), about "an ice-cold, egotistical, twenty-eight-year old artist", with a frustrated wife, and Cuckoo Oats (1929). She also wrote an acting manual and in the 1920s began a drama school,  at which one of her students was Elvira Mullens, later Elvira Barney. Benson's autobiography Mainly Players has an introduction by Arthur Machen, who was a member of the Benson company from 1901 to 1909. She died in London on 19 January 1946.