Portrait of Miss Gertie Millar

An actress of some repute and later the Countess of Dudley, Gertie Millar was born in Bradford in 1879, the daughter of a mill-hand. She made her stage debut at the age of thirteen in The Babes in the Wood at the St James's Theatre, Manchester, and by 1901 she was performing in the West End as Cora Bellamy in The Toreador.
Her first husband, Lionel Monckton, died in 1924, and in the same year she married the widower William Humble Ward, second Earl of Dudley. She is pictured in the present work aged 14, a year after she embarked on her stage career.