HENRY HINCHLIFFE AINLEY, was an English actor born on this date (d: 10/31/1945).   After education at the church school of St Peter’s, Morley, Ainley became a bank clerk in Sheffield, where he took part in amateur dramatics. 

When the actor-manager George Alexander was on tour in 1899 in H. A. Jones’s play The Masqueraders, Ainley obtained his permission to “walk on” (i.e. appear as a non-speaking extra). He made his professional stage début in F. R. Benson’s company as a messenger in Macbeth. He remained with Benson for two years, making his London début at the Lyceum Theatre as the Duke of Gloster to Benson’s king in Henry V, in a cast that also featured Constance Benson, Leslie Faber, Harcourt Williams, Charles Doran and Oscar Asche.

In 1902 Alexander saw Ainley in Benson’s production of The Merchant of Venice and engaged him for the juvenile lead role of Paolo in Stephen Phillips’s Paolo and Francesca at the St James’s Theatre; this propelled him to stardom. 

After his first Shakespeare roles Ainley returned to Leeds to play at the Grand Theatre. Later roles included Oliver Cromwell, Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Macbeth himself. He played Malvolio and Leontes under the direction of Granville-Barker and portrayed Hamlet several times, including a 1930 production that was chosen for a Royal Command Performance.

John Gielgud held Ainley in high regard and fulfilled a longstanding ambition to perform with him when Gielgud played Iago opposite Ainley’s Othello in a 1932 BBC Radio broadcast. But he described Ainley’s Prospero as “disastrous”, writing in the Sunday Times in 1996.

In 1921, Ainley became a member of the council of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and served as its president from 1931 to 1933. In 1932, Ainley was part of the effort to save the debt-laden Sadler’s Wells theatre. 

He was married three times – to Susanne Sheldon, Elaine Fearon and the novelist Bettina Riddle, who was known as the Baroness von Hutten zum Stolzenberg. He had several children (although the published obituaries in The Times and The Stage disagree as to the precise numbers) which include the actors Henry T. Ainley, Richard Ainley, Anthony Ainley and Patsy Ainley. He was also the father of Henrietta Riddle who was briefly engaged to Alistair Cooke in 1932.

Fifteen letters in the possession of Laurence Olivier’s widow Joan Plowright suggest that Ainley had a sexual relationship with the younger actor in the late 1930s. The letters – said by Olivier’s biographer Terry Coleman to be explicitly homosexual in content – suggest that Ainley was infatuated with Olivier, even if, as some members of Olivier’s family insist, notably the actor’s son Tarquin Olivier, the feeling was not reciprocated. <eye roll>