Beatrice Irwin | |
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| Born | Alice Beatrice Simpson July 16, 1877 |
| Died | March 20, 1953 (aged 75) |
| Occupation(s) | Actress, poet, designer and Baháʼí advocate |
Beatrice Irwin (July 16, 1877, Dagshai, India - March 20, 1953, San Diego, California,) was an actress, poet, designer and promoter of the Baháʼí Faith. Born Alice Beatrice Simpson, she took Beatrice Irwin as her stage name and later adopted it as her real name.
After her family moved to Scotland and then to England, she attended Cheltenham Ladies' College where she graduated 1895 and took the Associate in Arts test in which she placed 5th for that year. She went on through a series of careers starting with being an actor in stage theatre which took her to Cape Colony, as it was known then, touring America, briefly in the then young country of Australia, and performed in Shanghai. Next she published a book of poetry and some poems were published in different venues. Neither careers were very successful but some of her work was considered pioneering particularly when she blended them with an intentional use of colored illumination. She met, admired, and was encouraged by, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Having had some contact with theosophists before 1910 she then also encountered a Sufi leader, Inayat Khan, and then head of the Baháʼí Faith, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, a religion she increasingly identified with. Her success with color led to a specialization and burgeoning career she named as an Illuminating Specialist including patenting a specific lighting fixture and writing a text The New Science of Colour partly relating to Color psychology. After her Baháʼí pilgrimage in 1930 to see then head of the religion Shoghi Effendi, and his initiation of plans to implement the Tablets of the Divine Plan by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá for which she had already shown actions, she devoted much of her later years to promoting the religion in Central and then South America before going on to Mallorca in her last years before returning to San Diego where she died. While she was increasingly occupied with those endeavors, her work in color, particularly from the New Science of Colour, was taken in with great interest by some Australian artists - Roy de Maistre and most particularly Grace Cossington Smith - though largely from a theosophist understanding.