On completing the tour the company sailed from New York for London with Neilson continuing on to Paris to prepare for her forthcoming marriage to Compton arranged for September 1880. However, while driving in the Bois de Boulogne in August 1880 she suffered a ruptured aneurysm, dying a few hours later. In her will she left Compton £2000. He returned to the Adelphi Theatre for a short period following which he used the bequest to set up the Compton Comedy Company which put on the plays of William Shakespeare and period English comedies across the country from 1881 to 1923. His leading lady was Virginia Frances Bateman (1853–1940), the daughter of the American actor H. L. Bateman. They married at St Peter's Church in Brighton on 12 June 1882 and had five children: the novelist Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972) and the actors Frank Compton (1885–1964), Viola Compton (1886–1971), Ellen Compton (1891–1970), and Fay Compton (1894–1978). Among other roles Compton played Malvolio in "Twelfth Night" (1881), Dr. Pangloss in "The Heir At Law" (1881), Mawworm in Isaac Bickerstaffe's "The Hypocrite" (1881), Jack Rover in "Wild Oats" (1882), Tony Lumpkin in" She Stoops to Conquer" (1882), Charles Surface in "The School For Scandal" (1883), Dromio of Syracuse in "The Comedy of Errors" (1883) and Bob Acres in "The Rivals" (1883). By 1891 the Compton Comedy Company had been touring the UK for ten years and had given thousands of performances of such plays as Sheridan's "The Rivals" and "The School for Scandal", "The Road to Ruin" by Thomas Holcroft, "David Garrick" by T. W. Robertson and "She Stoops to Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith. Compton decided that the time was right to take his company to London, and he wrote to Henry James asking him to adapt his novel "The American" into a play for the stage - to which James agreed. Performed by the Compton Comedy Company, the play premièred in January 1891 in Southport with Compton playing Christopher Newman, the American, and was a financial and critical success. Compton took "The American" to the Opera Comique in London on 26 September 1891, with himself again playing Christopher Newman, but the London audiences were unappreciative of the drama, finding the acting heavy-handed and the plot confusing and uneven.