Biography

In her first stage appearance she played Juliet with Kyrle Bellew in 1883.

As an actress, Constance Benson worked in the theatre, but 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 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 was a British stage and film actress. Before her marriage to Frank Benson, she was known by the stage name Constance Featherstonhaugh, pronounced "Fanshaw".

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.