Dame Mary Susan Etherington, (15 July 1864 – 15 October 1942), known professionally as Marie Tempest, was an English singer and actress. Tempest became a famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere. She was, at times, her own theatre manager during a career spanning 55 years. She was also instrumental in the founding of the actors' union Equity in Britain. Life and career Tempest was born in London. Her parents were Edwin Etherington (1838–1880), a stationer, and his wife, Sarah Mary (née Castle). She had a sister, Florence Etherington, who married the theatre manager Michael Levenston. Tempest was educated at Midhurst School and an Ursuline convent in Tildonk, Belgium. Later, she studied music in Paris and at the Royal Academy of Music in London, as a singing pupil of Manuel García, the tutor of Jenny Lind, Mathilde Marchesi and Charles Santley, among others. She adopted as her stage name part of the name of Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, whom she referred to as her godmother. Tempest married Alfred Edward Izard, another student at the Academy, in 1885. That marriage ended in divorce four years later, and Izard was awarded damages in the divorce settlement. She had a son named Norman in 1888, who would later be referred to in the press as "Norman Lennox", taking part of the surname of Tempest's second husband, Cosmo Gordon-Lennox, whom she married a decade later. Early career Tempest debuted in 1885 as Fiametta in Franz Suppé's operetta Boccaccio at the Comedy Theatre in London, where she also took the title role in Erminie by Edward Jakobowski. She starred steadily in London for the next two years in light operas by Hervé and André Messager, among others. She became internationally famous for her performance in the title role in Dorothy by Alfred Cellier and B. C. Stephenson (1887), which ran for a record-setting 931 performances (becoming a hit after Tempest took over the title role from Marion Hood). Richard D'Oyly Carte considered engaging her for his opera company but W. S. Gilbert (after seeing her in Dorothy) reported that she "screeched", and the proposal was dropped. [[File:Tempest1886.jpg|upright|left|thumb|Tempest in Dorothy, 1886]] In 1889 Tempest was a replacement player in the title role of Cellier and Stephenson's Doris, brought in to save the flagging show. The next year, in