Ira Aldridge — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
Ira Frederick Aldridge was born in New York on 24 July 1807, the son of the Reverend Daniel Aldridge and his wife Luranah, free African Americans; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives 1805 and allows for Bel Air, Maryland. He had no Russian ancestry. He enters the archive because the Russian Empire became the second home of his career and the place where he died.
As a young man he acted with amateur companies in New York. Finding no future for a Black actor in the white theatres of America, he went to England, and in 1826 made a successful London debut as Othello. Over the following decades he played across Britain and Ireland, and from 1852 toured continental Europe, where audiences called him the African Roscius.
In 1858 he accepted an invitation from the Russian Imperial Theatre, and on 10 November that year played Othello in St Petersburg. In the audience was Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian poet and painter, born a serf in 1814 and only recently released from exile, who was moved to tears and wrote to a friend that Aldridge worked miracles on the stage. They met two days later at the home of a Russian aristocrat and became friends; Shevchenko attended all his performances in the capital and drew his portrait in 1858. When Aldridge returned to England, he took with him a portrait of Shevchenko by a Russian artist.
Shevchenko died in March 1861, but Aldridge came back. Between 1861 and 1866 he made several tours of the Empire, three of them to Ukraine, playing in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Zhytomyr and Yelisavetgrad as well as in Moscow and St Petersburg, and one Russian critic counted his Othello, Lear and Shylock among the great evenings of his theatre-going life.
In August 1867, while rehearsing Othello in Łódź, then a textile town in Congress Poland within the Russian Empire, he died suddenly, aged sixty. He never returned to the United States. He was buried in the city's Evangelical-Augsburg cemetery on Ogrodowa Street, where twelve Łódź guilds and the band of a Russian dragoon regiment followed his coffin, and the city took responsibility for his grave. In 2014 Łódź unveiled a plaque at the former hotel where he died. In Washington a monument stands to him, two and a half miles from one to Shevchenko.
"Left New York for England in the 1820s; toured continental Europe from 1852; invited to St Petersburg in 1858 and toured the Russian Empire repeatedly until 1866; died in Łódź in 1867."
Migration storyTracing the roots — New York (born); worked in the Russian Empire 1858–1866; died in Łódź, Congress Poland
No Russian ancestry. Invited by the Russian Imperial Theatre, he played Othello in St Petersburg in November 1858, where Taras Shevchenko saw him and became his friend, toured the Russian Empire repeatedly until 1866, and died on tour in Łódź, then in Congress Poland, in 1867. He is buried there.
No Russian ancestry; son of the Reverend Daniel and Luranah Aldridge of New York.
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New York (born); worked in the Russian Empire 1858–1866; died in Łódź, Congress Poland. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.