Francis Courtney Wemyss

Wemyss, Francis Courtney (1797–1859), actor and manager. The native Londoner, son of a British naval officer and an American mother, appeared on English stages for several years before coming to America in 1822 to join the company at Philadelphia's Chestnut Street Theatre. He was an accomplished, if unexceptional, comedian, who in keeping with the diversity required by the stock companies of the day often assumed dramatic roles. He was acting in one of these, Duncan to Macready's Macbeth, at the time of the Astor Place Riots. Wemyss eventually became manager of the Chestnut Street Theatre and later of houses in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and New York, including Barnum's American Museum. Much admired for his offstage courtliness and integrity, he was a secretary of the Dramatic Fund. However, Wemyss is best remembered as the author of the autobiographical Twenty‐Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (1847) and as editor of The Acting American Theatre, a series of volumes of early American plays.