Early years Waller was born in
Bilbao, Spain, the eldest son of an English civil engineer, William James Lewis, and his wife, Carlotta
née Vyse. He was educated at
King's College School in south west London, From 1879 to 1883 he was a clerk in a London firm owned by his uncle. After acting in amateur performances, Waller decided to make a career on the stage and was engaged by
J. L. Toole in 1883. His first role was the Hon. Claude Lorrimer in
H. J. Byron's ''Uncle Dick's Darling'', in which he was billed as "Waller Lewis". By May of the same year, he had adopted the stage name Lewis Waller. In that month he appeared at the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in a charity matinee for the Actors' Benevolent Fund with Toole's company and such contemporary stars as
Rutland Barrington,
Lionel Brough,
Arthur Cecil,
Nellie Farren,
George Grossmith,
Henry Irving and
Ellen Terry. He remained in Toole's company for a year, playing light comedy and juvenile parts. He joined a touring company, playing the central role, the blind Gilbert Vaughan, in
Called Back by
Hugh Conway, dramatised by
J. Comyns Carr. He returned to London in March 1885 to play at the
Lyceum Theatre in
Helena Modjeska's company, as the Abbé in
Adrienne Lecouvreur, and then toured with her, playing such roles as Mortimer in
Mary Stuart and Orlando in
As You Like It; Towards the end of 1885, Waller ventured into management for the first time, touring a production of
Called Back, switching to the role of Dr. Basil North, in which
The Manchester Guardian thought him "a trifle too melodramatic". The tour was modestly successful, but not such as to lead Waller to mount further productions for the moment. and Captain Absolute in
The Rivals; and at the
Gaiety Theatre he played Jacques Rosney in
Civil War. In particular he played several
Ibsen roles in these matinees in the early 1890s, bringing him to the attention of people of influence in the theatre such as
William Archer,
Jacob Grein and
Bernard Shaw. Waller played Oswald in
Ghosts, Lovborg in
Hedda Gabler, Rosmer in
Rosmersholm and Solness in
The Master Builder. The ODNB comments that Archer was "delighted that an established West End actor had contributed to the Ibsen revival but was aware that Waller could overcome neither the plays' inadequate rehearsal period nor his background of florid West End performances." Returning to London, Waller, in partnership with H. H. Morrell, leased the
Theatre Royal, Haymarket while its regular tenant,
Herbert Beerbohm Tree was on tour in the US. He began with the premiere of Wilde's
An Ideal Husband, playing Sir Robert Chiltern in a cast that included his wife as Mrs. Cheveley,
Julia Neilson as Lady Chiltern and
Charles Hawtrey as Lord Goring. Waller and Morrell remained in management until 1897, when Tree invited Waller to join his company at the newly rebuilt
Her Majesty's Theatre. Waller remained with Tree for three years, playing a wide range of roles, including romantic leads in popular costume dramas and, in Tree's lavish Shakespeare productions, Laertes in
Hamlet, Brutus in
Julius Caesar, Faulconbridge in
King John and Lysander in ''A Midsummer Night's Dream''.
Twentieth century , 1906 After leaving Tree's company, Waller returned to management, and remained an actor-manager for the rest of his career. Although he loved playing Shakespeare, adding the roles of Romeo, Othello and Henry V to his repertoire, for commercial reasons he was best known as the star of swashbuckling romances. He was particularly identified with the title roles in the stage versions of
Booth Tarkington's
Monsieur Beaucaire and
Arthur Conan Doyle's
Brigadier Gerard. The critic
Hesketh Pearson praised Waller for "his good looks [and] his virile acting and his vibrant voice" which "rang through the theatre like a bell and stirred like a trumpet". Pearson lamented, "the puerile nature of the plays he usually put on, and the adolescent behaviour of his female admirers, prevented many people from appreciating his superb gift as a declaimer of Shakespeare's rhetoric, and frequently exposed him to ridicule." In 1911 and 1912, Waller made a tour of the US, Canada and Australia. In his absence his wife died. After the West End run, Waller took the play on tour, during which he contracted
pneumonia, from which he died in
Nottingham two days short of his 55th birthday. ==Recordings==