Iris Tree

Iris Tree (1897 - 1968) was an English poet and actress, described as a bohemian, an eccentric, a wit and an adventuress.

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was her father. She was sought after, as a young woman, as an artists' model, being painted by Augustus John, simultaneously by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry, and sculpted by Jacob Epstein, showing her bobbed hair (she was said to have cut off the rest and left it on a train) that, along with other behaviour, caused much scandal. She was photographed by Man Ray. She ran with Nancy Cunard for a time, in a set at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant of Rudolph Stulik; and acted alongside Diana Cooper in the mid-1920s.

She had studied at the Slade School of Art. She contributed verse to the 1917 Sitwell anthology Wheels; her published collections were Poems (1920) and The Traveller and other Poems (1927).

She married twice. Her first marriage was to Curtis Moffat, a New Yorker; Ivan Moffat, the screenwriter, was their son. Her second marriage was to the actor and ex-officer of the Austrian cavalry, Friedrich von Ledebur-Wicheln. They both appear (after their divorce) in the 1956 film version of Moby-Dick. She also appears in a cameo, essentially as herself, in Federico Fellini's La dolce vita.

She is the great grandmother of actress Georgina Moffat.

References

• The Rainbow Picnic: A Portrait of Iris Tree (1974) Daphne Vivian Fielding

External links

• IMDb entry
• Tree archive at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, University of Bristol