1865. Having made a good profit from her American tour she returned to England in 1837, appearing in London as Maurice, a dumb boy in J.R.Planché's The Child of the Wreck. Planché wrote the play around her, and it ran for an impressive forty nights at Drury Lane, and Céleste's performance was praised by the reviewer of The Times(London). She now gave up dancing, and concentrated on acting and theater management. In 1843 she joined Benjamin Webster in the management of the Theatre Royal, Liverpool, and later at the Adelphi in London. They produced a series of successful domestic dramas, usually with Céleste in the leading role, and many written by John Baldwin Buckstone, who created Céleste's best-known and favorite role of Miami, the half-Native American, half-French heroine of The Green Bushes (1845). Miami, who at one point kills her unfaithful Irish lover but later atones by returning his child to its homeland, is a 'subtle blend of sympathetic innocence and raw, almost anarchic energy'. Céleste and Webster became lovers, and by 1869 their liaison seems to have been generally known and accepted in their social circle, with Charles Dickens referring to their daughters in one of his letters that year. They later quarrelled seriously however and Céleste took on the sole management of the Lyceum and in 1860 that of the Olympic Theatre, where she created one of her most famous roles as Ernest de la Garde in The House on the Bridge of Notre Dame. Embarking on a long foreign tour between 1863 and 1868, during which she visited both America and Australia, Céleste made the first of her 'farewell performances' as Rudiga in The Woman in Red by Stirling Coyne. She subsequently came out of retirement several times, often to benefit Webster, with whom she was reconciled and who was suffering financial difficulties. Her last stage appearance seems to have been in 1874, again playing her favorite character Miami in The Green Bushes. Throughout her career Céleste was notable for embodying characters of non-European origin who 'crossed the boundaries of both gender and ethnicity'. Death Céleste died of cancer at 18 Rue de Chapeyron, Paris, on 12 February 1882. Selected appearances (incomplete) The Willow Copse (1849 debut at the Adelphi, and subsequently in the United States) References French female dancers 1815 births 1882 deaths 19th-century French actresses French stage actresses Actresses from Paris