David Garrick was the most famous English actor of the eighteenth century, and the most celebrated. He was also a highly successful writer and manager and he was a master of self-promotion . In an age of growing celebrity status he was painted more than any other actor of the age, with famous portraits by Hogarth, Zoffany and Reynolds. He burst on to the stage in 1741 as Richard III and achieved great critical acclaim for his performances but he also succeeded in transforming the role of the actor into a more acceptable career. It was his friend and mentor Samuel Johnson who famously noted that "his profession made him rich and he made his profession respectable." He was also largely responsible for the growing popular status of Shakespeare, culminating in the Stratford Jubilee of 1769, which firmly placed the Bard’s home town on the tourist map.

The great female roles in the Shakespeare canon - from Rosalind and Viola, to Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth - were all originally played by men. His roles for young female lovers would have been taken by the boy apprentices and the tradition of cross-dressing was a cultural norm. Only later in the seventeenth century did women work professionally on the London stage and it was many years before the reputation of the ‘actress’ was positively established. The Shakespearean actresses who became popular with audiences alongside their male colleagues such as Garrick gradually established their own celebrity status. Sarah Siddons was arguably the first “star” performer, she carefully guarded her offstage reputation and slowly but surely, the role of the actress gained acceptance and status in society. Later, performers such as Sarah Bernhardt began to push the boundaries of the traditional repertoire playing leading male roles including Hamlet, and by the late nineteenth century Ellen Terry had ensured that the “Heroines of Shakespeare” were firmly in the female canon.