thumb|John Baldwin Buckstone
John Baldwin Buckstone (14 September 1802 – 31 October 1879) was an English actor, playwright and comedian who wrote 150 plays, the first of which was produced in 1826.
He starred as a comic actor during much of his career for various periods at the Adelphi Theatre and the Haymarket Theatre, managing the Haymarket from 1853 to 1877.
Biography
Buckstone was born in Hoxton, London, the son of John Buckstone, a retired shopkeeper, and his wife Elizabeth (née Baldwin). He was educated at Walworth Grammar School and was briefly apprenticed on a naval ship at age 10 but returned to school. He studied law and was articled to a solicitor but turned to acting by age 19.
Early career
Buckstone first joined a travelling troupe in 1821 as Gabriel in The Children in the Wood. and toured for three years, mostly in the southeast of England. He found a mentor in Edmund Kean. He made his first London appearance, on 30 January 1823, at the Surrey Theatre, as Ramsay in The Fortunes of Nigel. In 1824 he joined that theatre and played Peter Smink in The Armistice with great success. He also began to write plays.
thumb|left|Portrait of Buckstone
His successes led to his engagement in 1827 at the Adelphi Theatre, where he remained as the leading low comedian until 1833. Buckstone's acting was described as "a union of shrewdness and drollery, with their interaction upon each other ... was irresistibly comic." Buckstone wrote most of his plays in the first half of his career, and many of these were produced at the Adelphi. As his acting career reached the height of its success, his playwriting output declined. At the Adelphi, he appeared as Bobby Trot in his first really successful play, the melodrama Luke the Labourer (1827), which he had written in 1826. There he also created the role of Bob, in Dion Boucicault's Old Heads and Young Hearts, and played several other memorable roles, including, Slowboy in Cricket on the Hearth, Dan in John Bull, MacDunnum of Dunnum in A School for Scheming, Scrub in The Beaux' Stratagem and Golightly in Lend Me Five Shillings, and several Shakespeare roles. For the Adelphi, he wrote The Green Bushes and The Flowers of the Forest, both in 1847. He also dramatised The Last Days of Pompeii. In 1868, Buckstone's son Frederick appeared at the theatre in Walter Gordon's farce Pay to the Bearer a Kiss. W. S. Gilbert premiered seven of his plays at the Haymarket during this time including his blank verse "fairy comedies" starring the Kendals, such as The Palace of Truth (1870), Pygmalion and Galatea (1871) and The Wicked World (1873). Buckstone also produced Gilbert's dramas, Charity (1874) and Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith (1876), as well as his 1877 farce Engaged. In 1873 Buckstone introduced the innovation of matinées starting at 2.00 pm. By the mid-1870s, however, Buckstone's company was disbanding, and in 1877, ill and bankrupt after sustaining heavy losses, he gave up management of the theatre. with whom he had at least five children before she died in 1844. Their son Frederick was an actor. In 1857 Buckstone married Fanny's cousin Isabella Copeland, the great-niece of the theatre manager Robert Copeland, and they had 12 children between 1857 and 1876. Their daughter Lucy Isabella Buckstone and their sons John Copeland Buckstone and Rowland Buckstone also took to the stage.
After three years of ill health, Buckstone died at his home, Bell Green Lodge, in Lower Sydenham in 1879 at the age of 77 and was buried in Ladywell Cemetery.
According to director Nigel Everett and stagehands at the Haymarket Theatre, Buckstone's ghost has often been seen at the theatre, particularly during comedies and "when he appreciates things" playing there. In 2009, The Daily Telegraph reported that the actor Patrick Stewart saw the ghost standing in the wings during a performance of Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket.