Julia Lambert

Julia Lambert is the main character of Maugham’s novel “Theatre”. She is an independent woman, in whom the sense of humor, the ability to judge people and to understand the circumstances are combined with being an adventurer.She is a beautiful woman, more or less a careful mother, a rather good wife and a brilliant actress. In fact Julia is a sensitive idealistic nature and is always searching for perfection in herself and in others.

She was really a born actress and it was an understood thing for as long as she could remember that she was to go on the stage. And the fate gave her a great opportunity to develop her talent. Julia had been sent to live with her mother’s sister who was married to a Frenchman, a coal merchant, who lived at St.Malo, while she attended classes at the local lycee. She learnt to speak French like a Frenchwoman. That fact played a definite role in making as an actress.
Thanks for her aunt, Madame Falloux, who was ‘en relations’ with as old actress who had been a societaire of the Comedie Francaise and who had retired to St. Malo to live on the small pension that one of her lovers had settled on her when after many years of faithful concubinage that had parted, Julia could teach the acting. It was she (Jane Taitbout) who gave Julia her first lessons. She taught her all the arts that she had herself learnt at the Conservatoire and she talked to her of Reichenberg who had played ingenues till she was seventy, of Sarah Bernhardt and her golden voice, of Mounet-Sully and his majesty, and of Coquelin the greatest actor of them all. She recited to her the great tirades of Corneilly and Racine as she had learned to say them at the Francaise and taught her to say them I the same way. Jane Taitbout must always have been a very stagy actress, but she taught Julia to articulate with extreme distinctness, she taught her not to be afraid of her own voice, and she made deliberate that wonderful sense of timing which Julia had by instinct and which