Wills, William Gorman (1828–91), playwright and painter, was born 28 January 1828 in Kilmurry, Co. Kilkenny, third child of the writer James Wills (qv) and his wife Katherine, daughter of the Rev. W. Gorman and niece of the chief justice, Charles Kendal Bushe (qv). The Willses had come to Ireland with Oliver Cromwell (qv) and were distantly related to the Wildes (hence ‘Wills’ as the fourth given name of Oscar Wilde (qv)). William was educated at Lucan under Dr Dee, at Dr Price's Waterford grammar school, and at TCD, which he entered in 1845. He took the vice-chancellor's prize for English verse but never graduated. He was already distinguished for his carelessness, generosity, and charm, and his creativity was too generalised for specific application. Talented at music, literature, and drawing, he studied for a time at the RHA, exhibiting a few works including a portrait of Trinity's Dr Bartholomew Lloyd (qv) in 1854. His first novel, Old times, was brought out in instalments in the Irish Metropolitan Magazine, and was favourably reviewed in the Athenaeum on its full publication in 1857. However, he was unable to earn a living; this affected him little, since he was abstemious and indifferent to squalor, but his work was desultory, which affected him more. In 1862 he left definitively for London and set up in Clifford's Inn, near Temple Bar, where he lived six years impecuniously, but published four gloomy novels with Gothic overtones. The most successful, especially in America, was the thriller The wife's evidence (1863), which earned him £120, while The love that kills (1867) dealt sympathetically with the famine and the 1848 rebellion.
His father's death (1868) impelled Wills to take on the support of his mother, whom he established in Wellington Road, Dublin, and maintained for the last twenty years of her life. His brother and biographer, Freeman Wills, held that this provided the impetus for his subsequent success: ‘Failing something to keep him up to it, he would not merely for the sake of making money have devoted himself’ (W. G. Wills, 60). He determined on art as more lucrative than literature, and, moving to a studio in Fulham Road, began drawing in pastels. His most successful subjects were women and children; he built up a fashionable clientele, was eventually commissioned to draw the queen's grandchildren, and was patronised by Princess Louise. His ‘Laertes and Ophelia’, exhibited in the RA in 1874, was successful in Paris. The subject matter reflected his newfound career as a dramatist, on which his fame rests. His first play, ‘Man o' Airlie’, adapted from a German play about a ruined poet, was performed in July 1867 and made little money but was an important critical success, though his two subsequent plays were inferior. However, his bohemian character impressed Col. Bateman, owner of the Lyceum, who took him on as dramatist at a yearly salary of £300, an astute appointment which more than paid off. Wills's first two plays for the Lyceum, ‘Medea at Corinth’ and ‘Charles I’, finally drew the public and by the time of ‘Faust’ in 1885, he was writing the most popular plays in London. This was greatly due to his fortunate collaborations with actors, beginning with Henry Irving in ‘Charles I’. Opening on 28 September 1872, it packed the Lyceum for 180 nights but is now famous only as the play that made Irving's name. In this sentimental tragedy in blank verse, Wills's innovation was a negative depiction of Cromwell, which roused liberal fury. A controversy ensued in the press, exploited by Bateman, who planted people in the audience to alternately hiss and boo. The following April, Wills wrote another hit for Irving, ‘Eugene Aram’, and thereafter wrote to Bateman's and Irving's orders, often producing two plays a year. His next triumph came in March 1877 with ‘Olivia’, his adaptation of The vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith (qv). A charming sentimental comedy, it too was chiefly famous as a star vehicle for Ellen Terry. George Bernard Shaw (qv) called it the best nineteenth-century play in the Lyceum's repertory, but reserved most praise for Terry.
Wills subsequently produced a great number of inferior plays; his ‘Faust’ was booked out before it opened on 19 December 1885, but its success was entirely down to Irving and Terry in the main roles and the enormous sum (allegedly £15,000) that Irving spent on the lavish staging. Wills's verse was ‘little more than a libretto for an infernal pantomime’ (L. Irving, 461). None of his successes brought Wills fame, for (in contrast to his kinsman Oscar Wilde, soon to take his place as London's most popular dramatist) he shunned rather than courted publicity and refused to take curtain calls. He treated his work perfunctorily, regarding it as a livelihood only and declining to rewrite or attend rehearsals. Disliking the theatre, he pinned all his creative hopes on poetry and painting.
After his mother's death in April 1887, he moved to Walham Green and wrote three more plays before he died in Guy's Hospital, London, on 13 December 1891. He was buried in Brompton cemetery. His reputation did not even survive the century; the critic Augustin Filon concluded in 1897 that the glamour of his bohemian life and impassioned character obscured the weakness of his plays. Strickland doubted that he would ever have made a good painter even with more time to devote to art, and Hogan calls his plays interesting only as cultural relics.