Duse Mohamed Ali (1866-1945): The Autobiography of a Pioneer Pan African and Afro-Asian Activist
ISBN: 9781569023440
$24.95
Duse Mohamed Ali was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Egyptian father and a Sudanese Mother. He attended King’s College of London. In 1885 at age of nineteen, he started a career as a stage actor that lasted for twenty-four years. He was also in the company of Herbert Beerbohm Tree and in Mrs. Langtry's Antony and Cleopatra production, at the Royal Princess Theatre, London. Mr. Ali also toured England, Ireland and Scotland. He produced Othello and The Merchant of Venice at Hull, Yorkshire in 1902, playing the parts of Othello and the Prince of Morocco, and winning the plaudits of the British Press. Among his credits as a playwright are The Jews Revenge produced at the Royal Surrey Theatre in London, in 1903; A Cleopatra Night at Dundee in 1907; and the Lily of Bermuda, a musical comedy which he produced at Theatre Royal, Manchester, in 1909. Every production of his received the enthusiastic welcome of the British and American Press, but perhaps the most outstanding of his productions and performances was A Daughter of Judah at the Empire Theatre, Glasgow, in 1906. Reviewing the production, the London Daily Telegraph wrote: "Duse Mohamed is an actor of outstanding merit." He also produced many plays in America where he won fame as an actor. He founded the Hull Shakespeare Society of which Sir Henry Irving was the first President and the Anglo-Ottoman Society, London which included Lords Newton, Lamington, Stourton and Mowbray. He founded and was Secretary of the Indian Moslem Soldiers' Widows' and Orphans' War Fund, in 1915, and among the patrons were Consuelo, the Duchess of Marlborough, the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, Sir Edward Grey, Lord and Lady Lamington, Lord and Lady Newton, the Marquis and Marchioness of Crew, Mrs. H.H. Asquith, Sir Austen and Lady Chamberlain, Lord Curzon, and almost all the members, of the British Cabinet.