Editing Elizabeth Barry (section)

==Early career==
Barry's first performance was at the age of 17 in [[Thomas Otway]]'s ''[[Alcibiades (play)|Alcibiades]]''. Her performance was so poor that she was fired from the Duke's Company. She then met [[John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester]]. Their relationship grew from professional colleagues to lovers. They had one child named Elizabeth, who was born in 1677 and died in 1689.{{citation needed|date=April 2018}}

Barry drew on her relationship with Rochester for many of her sexual performances. While multiple sources confirm that Rochester was Barry's lover, the only source for the coaching story is a ''Life'' of Barry published in 1741 &ndash; 65 years after the events &ndash; by [[Edmund Curll]], well known for his fanciful and inaccurate biographies.

Barry was a successful comedian who created a variety of [[Restoration comedy]] heroines throughout her career, but her greatest impact on [[Restoration drama]] was as a [[Tragedy|tragic]] actress. Her capacity for projecting pathos was an inspiration to playwrights [[Thomas Otway]] and [[Thomas Southerne]] in the three famous tragic roles they wrote for her: Monimia in Otway's ''[[The Orphan (play)|The Orphan]]'' (1680), Belvidera in Otway's ''[[Venice Preserved]]'' (1682), and Isabella in Southerne's ''[[The Fatal Marriage]]'' (1694). These three roles, wrote the [[Prompter (theatre)|prompter]] [[John Downes (prompter)|John Downes]], "gain'd her the Name of Famous Mrs. Barry, both at Court and City, for whenever She Acted any of these three Parts, she forc'd Tears from the Eyes of her Auditory, especially those who have any Sense of Pity for the Distress't." [[File:Dorset Gardens riverfront.jpg|thumb|left|250px|During the first part of her career, Barry worked at the Duke's Theatre at Dorset Gardens, on the riverfront, London's most luxurious playhouse.]]

In his autobiography, many years later, [[Colley Cibber]] recalled the power of her voice: "When distress of Tenderness possess'd her, she subsided into the most affecting Melody and Softness. In the Art of exciting Pity, she had a Power beyond all the Actresses I have yet seen, or what your Imagination can conceive."  Elizabeth Howe has argued that it was Barry's success in the role of Monimia that "clinched the movement away from [[heroic drama]] and started the establishment of '[[she-tragedy]]' as a popular genre." Also known as pathetic tragedy, innocent women were represented as sexual objects and as victims of male lust.

Barry was always described as being a plain woman. Portraits suggest intelligence but heavy features and the playwright Thomas Shadwell writes in a letter in 1692 that it would have been better to have staged Nicholas Brady's ''The Rape'' in Roman dress, "and then w'th a Mantle to have covered her hips Mrs Barry would have acted ye part." Apparently, none of this mattered to contemporaries. Even though Barry was "the ugliest Woman" in the world off stage, wrote an anonymous author in ''A Comparison Between the Two Stages'' (1702), she was "the finest Woman in the World upon the Stage."

Barry's acting style was embedded in the influences from her own personality and life. Elizabeth as a person was seen to be beautiful and virtuous. Although many of the characters she played were virgins, it was known about her relationship with Rochester. It has also been known that she channeled her sexual relationship with Rochester through many of her performances. Also during this time, it was seen that Barry's body had metaphorical meaning to the description of her character. When Barry starred in ''The Orphan'', it was implied that "the trope of the female breast to represent innocence or ruin (consider the many references to Monimia’s "swelling breasts" or "white breasts"). Thus Otway uses the dismemberment of the female body, expressed through the "mangled breasts besmeared with blood", to signify the ruin of the state".<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Hamilton|first1=Kate|title=The 'Famous Mrs. Barry': Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity|journal=Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture|date=2013|volume=42|pages=291–320|url=http://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/501489|doi=10.1353/sec.2013.0008|s2cid=144094409}}</ref>