Actress, Writer.  Hailed as “the perfect beauty” by the future George IV of England, who made her his first mistress, the scandalous events of Mrs. Robinson’s brief, tempestuous life have often overshadowed her significant talents onstage and as a woman of letters.  Born Mary Darby in Bristol, England, to a prosperous merchant and his blue-blooded wife, she had been a pretty, precociously intelligent little girl with a gift for poetry and foreign languages.  Her comfortable childhood ended, however, when her father lost his fortune and ran off with another woman.  Left without any means of support, Mrs. Darby opened a girls’ school in London, where 9-year-old Mary worked as a teacher until the age of 14, when she married Thomas Robinson, who had misled the Darbys into thinking him the heir to a great estate.  The happy teenaged bride gave birth to a daughter, Maria Elizabeth, but her husband’s gambling and inability to pay for their fashionable lifestyle soon put the couple and their baby in debtors’ prison for over 14 months.  Upon her release Mary sought to support her family as a dancer in Convent Garden, but when the great actor David Garrick heard her voice, he personally trained her to be an actress.  She subsequently made an auspicious debut playing Cordelia to his King Lear, and went on to further acclaim in other Shakespearean roles.  She also excelled in the comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and in a musical she had written herself.  As Perdita in “The Winter’s Tale” she so enchanted the young Prince of Wales that he became her lover, and their year-long liaison gave rise to her scandalous reputation.  She used notoriety to her advantage, however, doing as she pleased and becoming a trendsetter, fashion icon, and muse to the great artists of the era.  When the prince tired of her, she shrewdly negotiated a handsome financial settlement, and proceeded to bed other powerful men.  Mary was 23 when she met the love of her life, the rakish cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton, whose exploits during the American Revolutionary War had made him a hero in England.  Their off again, on again romance lasted 15 years, and she had been pregnant with his child when, in 1788, she suffered a miscarriage and injury which left her partially paralyzed for the rest of her life.  During her final dozen years she depended on her literary skills to support herself and her loved ones, at times even Tarleton, who ran up enormous gambling debts.  Her poetry was admired by Samuel Coleridge and Mary Wollstonecraft, and she authored plays, translations, political pamphlets and several best-selling novels.  She also assisted Tarleton with the writing of his wartime memoirs, and was devastated when he left her in 1798 to marry a more “respectable” woman.  Mary was editing her own memoirs, her daughter at her bedside, when she died at Englefield Cottage in Surrey two years later.  She was 42 years old at the time of her death, and had requested to be buried in the churchyard at Old Windsor. (bio by: Nikita Barlow)