Barbara Horder

Barbara Horder was an actress, director and artist who was born in London, the daughter of well known architect Percy Morley Horder but also lived in Vancouver, St. Francisco and Carmel, California.

In 1916 she founded an experimental theatre, The Garden Theatre in the converted stable and coach house of her home in Hamilton Terrace, St. John’s Wood, London. There sponsored by G.K. Chesterton, among other notables, she staged and directed foreign and original one-act plays. Among the actors were John Gielgud, her contemporary.

She started her acting career by training at the Central School of Speech and Drama with both Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud, at the time the famous Elsie Fogerty was teaching. She was also best friends with actress Elizabeth Irving, granddaughter of actor Sir Henry Irving, who later became Lady Elizabeth Brunner of Grey’s Court, Oxfordshire.

Her first job was in Cologne, Germany as part of the British-Rhine Army Repertory Company. She then worked as a stage manager at the Everyman Theatre in London. She appeared in Basil Dean’s Hassan at His Majesty’s Theatre and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Later she toured with Dame Sybil Thorndike, understudying her in Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan and spent two seasons at the Birmingham Repertory Company appearing in The Medea. She also played in St. Joan at the International Theatre Festival in Paris and did dramatic work for the BBC. After marrying Roger Rolleston West in 1930, she moved to Canada and directed at the Vancouver Little Theatre, lectured on speech and drama and directed plays for the Canadian Dominion Drama Festival.

Roger and Barbara then moved to San Francisco, where Barbara took up directing again, producing St. Joan and playing Olivia in the 1941 Greek Theatre production of Twelfth Night in Berkeley. She also collaborated with Emil Ludwig in writing and producing his play Ulysses at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Around this time Barbara met up with her old friend Laurence Olivier. He and his wife Vivien Leigh used their own money to put on the 1940 production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on Broadway casting Barbara as Lady Montague.

In the late 1940s, Barbara joined the Municipal Theatre in San Francisco teaching acting technique and speech as well as directing plays which included Volpone, She Stoops to Conquer and The Glass Menagerie.

Barbara moved to Carmel in the 1950s and became active with the Forest Theater Guild producing Twelfth Night. Whilst there she studied painting, becoming a very well known portrait artist in her later years and a member of the Carmel Art Association.

When her husband died in 1975, she returned to live in England in 1976 and went to live in Bristol to be near her only sister actress Joanna Horder until her death in 1986. See below for more of Barbara’s stage roles.