William James Holloway (4 February 1843 – 7 April 1913), known professionally as W. J. Holloway, was an Australian actor and stage manager who after some successes moved to London, from where he made several tours of South Africa. He married twice; and recognising the talent of his second wife's daughter, developed it to the full and drove her, as Essie Jenyns, to fame and exhaustion. He also made competent actors of his own children; he was an excellent teacher.
History
William John Holloway was born on 4 February 1843 at Westminster in London, the eldest child of William Michael Holloway and Emma (née Symonds). In 1856 the family emigrated to Australia aboard the vessel Edward Oliver, but Holloway's mother died during the voyage. The ship arrived in Sydney in November 1956.
Holloway began his working life as a boilermaker in the late 1850s at the iron foundry of P. N. Russell and Co. at Pyrmont, where in 1870 the future Premier of New South Wales, J. S. T. McGowen (1855–1922), began his apprenticeship, according to one report, under Holloway's direction. Another notable apprentice, who attributed his love of the stage to Holloway, was George P. Carey.
His theatrical career began in 1862 with the Redfern Amateur Dramatic Club. Fifty years later a correspondent to the Sydney Morning Herald recounted how they staged the Eugene Aram story with Holloway in the name part, also reciting Thomas Hood's The Dream of Eugene Aram. In 1863 he married Maria McKewen, an actress about whom little has been found. They would have four children (see below).
He made what may have been his first professional appearance in Brisbane in the 1866 pantomime season and in March 1867 starred at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Brisbane in Eugene Aram or The Spectre of St Robert's Cave, featuring the Pepper's ghost illusion. Mrs Holloway was on the bill playing Madeline Lester. It is unlikely that either this or the Redfern production had anything to do with the W. G. Wills drama. A review of his benefit performance damned him with faint praise. When he left Brisbane in March 1868 a review of his farewell benefit was sympathetic. He joined the corps dramatique of Sydney's Victoria Theatre in 1869; his first billing was with Marie Duret in Lucretia Borgia for Rosa Cooper.
By 1872 Holloway had assembled a touring company, whose members included "Miss Kate Arden". In 1877 he married Arden, whose real name was Elizabeth Jennings, a widow since 1871. Her daughter Elizabeth Esther Jennings (5 October 1864 – 6 August 1920) would become the actress "Essie Jenyns", acclaimed as the finest Shakespearian actress Australia had produced.
Holloway leased the Theatre Royal (Hobart) and assembled a "Star Dramatic Company" in 1878–9 to support William Creswick and Helen Ashton, playing Sheridan Knowles' Virginius and The Hunchback and several Shakespeare classics. Its members included his brother Charles Holloway.
Essie made her first stage appearance with the Holloway company in Augustin Daly's Leah the Forsaken in 1879, but Holloway wisely refrained from exposing the wunderkind prematurely.
England
They took a holiday in London 1884–5, during which time Essie Jenyns immersed herself in the work of Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, Mary Anderson and other great English (and American) actresses.
Australia
They returned to Australia with a hectic touring schedule, playing Frank Harvey's A Mad Marriage at the Academy of Music, Ballarat in January 1886, and in February the same author's The Ring of Iron at the newly opened Academy of Music in Launceston, to excellent reviews: play, cast (notably Essie Jenyns, in her first professional appearance in Tasmania), and the theatre itself.
When they returned to the Opera House, Sydney however, The Ring of Iron was described by one reviewer as a "tawdry melodrama" which was "soon withdrawn" in favor of Mrs G. W. Lovell's Ingomar the Barbarian, with Holloway in the title role and his wife as Aetoea, a part she knew from her early days with the company.