Cecil Raleigh

Cecil Raleigh was the pseudonym of Abraham Cecil Francis Fothergill Rowlands (27 January 1856 – 10 November 1914), an English actor and playwright.

Abraham Cecil Francis Fothergill Rowlands was born on 27 January 1856 in Monmouthshire, the son of Cecilia Anne Daniel Riley (1813–1911) and her second husband Dr. John Fothergill Rowlands (1823–1878). He took the stage name of Cecil Raleigh. On 19 December 1882, he married Effie Adelaide Henderson (1859 – 16 October 1936), a British novelist who published as Effie Adelaide Rowlands and later E. Maria Albanesi, whom he later divorced. On 31 March 1894, he remarried Isabel Pauline Ellissen (8 August 1862 – 22 August 1923), an actress under the stage name Saba Raleigh.

Cecil Raleigh died in London on 10 November 1914.

He played for a time in musical theatre, but deserted acting for playwriting and, either alone or in collaboration, produced melodramas, other plays and musical pieces, staged at first chiefly at the Comedy Theatre, London, and in later years at Drury Lane.

Cheer, Boys, Cheer (1895); Hearts are Trumps (1899); The Best of Friends (1902); and The Whip (1909–10) are typical examples of his plays, but he was particularly successful with his musical pieces, Little Christopher Columbus (1893), Dick Whittington and His Cat (1894), The Yashmak (1897) and The Sunshine Girl (1912).

Several of his plays were later made into motion pictures. He acted as dramatic critic in two or three London papers, and became secretary to the School of Dramatic Art in Gower Street, London.