Success Quote by Ellen Terry

Imagination, in Ellen Terry's mouth, isn't a gauzy synonym for whimsy; it's a hard-nosed survival skill for a working actor. The exclamation points read like a stage direction: insistence, urgency, a bit of showmanship. Terry is answering a question about "success" with an answer that sidesteps the usual Victorian virtue list (discipline, decorum, elocution) and goes straight to the engine room. Technique can be drilled, beauty fades, luck is fickle. Imagination is the thing that keeps performance from becoming repetition.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to the era's taste for "natural" acting as a kind of effortless authenticity. Terry suggests that what audiences experience as spontaneous is actually built - the actor must invent a living inner life night after night, under changing conditions, with different partners, in different rooms, for different crowds. Imagination here means empathy, elasticity, the ability to conjure stakes where there may be none and to make the familiar newly charged.

Context sharpens the stakes: Terry came up in a theater world that was professionalizing, where celebrity was rising alongside punishing schedules and rigid social expectations for women. Declaring imagination "first" is both an artistic manifesto and a claim to authority. It's her way of saying: the stage isn't a place where you merely display yourself. It's a place where you transform - and the power to transform is the real credential.