by Sue Corbett
The Cassons rejoined forces in Hunter’s next play at the Haymarket, in time for the celebration of her stage jubilee in 1954. During the years that followed they appeared together in many different parts of the world: in India, the Far East and Africa in dramatic recitals; in Australia and New Zealand in plays by Terence Rattigan and Enid Bagnold; in New York in Graham Greene’s The Potting Shed; and in England in Clemence Dane’s Eighty in the Shade, a production that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of their marriage.
In 1962 Dame Sybil undertook with her husband another series of poetry recitals in Australia, appeared with him in Chekhov on the “horse-shoe” stage of the new Festival Theatre at Chichester, this being the type of stage that she said she preferred to all others. A few weeks after attaining the age of 80, she acted, this time without Casson, and sang one number, in a musical version of Vanity Fair.
All-star cast: Dame Sybil Thorndike (centre) with Irene Worth, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Lewis Casson at the Haymarket Theatre, London, in 1953
She was also without Casson in the production of William Douglas-Home’s political comedy The Reluctant Peer. In 1966 she was invited to launch the Morning Star, the enlarged successor to the Daily Worker. In that year also, the public was invited to subscribe to the building of a theatre at Leatherhead to be called the Thorndike, and the Cassons worked together again, in Arsenic and Old Lace, one matinee of which was cancelled to allow them to visit Oxford in order to receive a dual honorary degree — she already had honorary degrees from Manchester, Edinburgh and Southampton — from Mr Harold Macmillan. In 1970 Durham made her an honorary DLitt. In 1967 she was heard once more as Saint Joan during the BBC’s Sybil Thorndike Festival, and in 1968 she played, at Oxford, a very long part in a new play by Enid Bagnold, and, on tour, a part that was new to her in a revival of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall, in which her co-star was the former pop singer Adam Faith.
Sybil Thorndike saw it as her task as an actress to identify herself with as many other characters as possible, especially those whom she would not have wished to associate with had she met their counterparts in actual life. The wish to be at one with them through her work, and to enable audiences to have the same experience, was for her a part of religion, and the attempt to realize it was for her, again, an exercise that could be called religious. This did not come easily to her, except perhaps in Saint Joan, for, if she herself is to be believed, her spirit was always larger than her capacities. In developing the latter she owed much to the inspiration of music; something to her film work and to film directors such as Hitchcock (in Stagefright) and Olivier (in The Prince and the Showgirl), who encouraged her to play “down” and to aim at being 10 times smaller than life and yet true to it; and as much to her sense of humour, which had once, in the wartime blackout, cautioned her against wailing too loud off-stage as Medea, lest audiences might be deceived into supposing that her voice was an air-raid warning.
Her husband died in May, 1969, at the age of 93, but she remained undefeated and was present with ticket No 1 at the gala opening night of the Thorndike Theatre in September. Soon afterwards she appeared at the theatre in There Was an Old Woman. In June, 1970, she was created a Companion of Honour and two months later exuberantly opened the new adjunct to the National Theatre known as the Young Vic.
By her marriage to Casson she had two sons, John and Christopher, and two daughters, Mary and Ann, all of whom have at some time acted. In 1929 the freedom of the city of Rochester was conferred on her. In 1938 a memoir of Lilian Baylis by Sybil and Russell Thorndike was published. Never can biographers have been more in sympathy with their subject, or the subject of a biography have owed more, while she lived and worked, to those who described her work afterwards. Dame Sybil also edited a personal anthology of prose and verse, Favourites, which appeared in 1973. Of this daughter of the vicarage and parish worker it may be said that she lived to become the best-loved English actress since Ellen Terry.
Dame Sybil Thorndike, CH, DBE, actress, was born on October 24, 1882. She died on June 9, 1976, aged 93
DAME EDITH EVANS
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VERSATILE AND ADVENTUROUS ACTRESS BEST REMEMBERED FOR ONE CRESCENDO OF SCANDALIZED HORROR
OCTOBER 15, 1976
Dame Edith Evans was an actress of genius with an assured place in the history of English acting. Her genius, though primarily comic, expressed itself in an extraordinarily wide range of parts. In Restoration comedy she was unrivalled. Her playing in romantic comedy, Elizabethan and modern, made precious additions to playgoing memories. She could etch in melodrama a figure of macabre terror such as Agatha Payne in The Old Ladies (1935). She emerged from her rare ventures into tragedy never without honour and sometimes, for instance as the Rebecca West of Rosmersholm (1926), with the highest distinction. Her unforgettable stage personality was shaped by an exuberant vitality which technical accomplishment held delicately in check and by an imagination that flashed across the character impersonated penetrating glances of mischief, irony, gaiety and pathos.
To each of her parts she appeared to bring the special acting technique of the period to which it belonged. As Millamant (1924 and 1927); as Lady Wishfort (1948); as Mrs Sullen (1927 and 1930); as Lady Fidget (1936); she induced the audience to believe that now they knew exactly what fine Restoration acting was like. Yet her nurse in Romeo and Juliet (England 1926, 1932, 1935, 1961; New York 1934), a piece of boisterously chuckling low life with overtones of rough pathos, seemed the epitome of earthy Elizabethan humour. A vicar’s troubled wife; a staunch Welsh servant maid; a half-insane old sadist of a provincial lodging house; the brandy-drinking lady of Daphne Laureola (London 1949; New York 1950), startling a crowded modern restaurant with a burst of contralto song and a stream of embarrassing reminiscence — the treatment of all these diverse creatures exhibited the same nice adjustment of appropriate technical means to dramatic ends.
But nobody was ever so foolish as to measure the pleasures Edith Evans offered with a technical yardstick. What makes acting an art is not the imitation of external things but the spirit that informs the imitation. The comic spirit of the actress was ever ready to sally forth with gay knight-errantry to make “a new conquest over dullness.” Some familiar passage in classic comedy would solicit her attention, and then every word, every syllable even, would appear to spring in her some fresh delighted sense of the humour inherent in the whole; and when she had been happily delivered the audience knew that an old jest had been born anew. She could turn a piece of Restoration bawdry with such delicacy that it took on a delusive air of fine wit, and when she was Millamant mocking Mirabell the mockery was drawn out so deliciously that we wished it never to end.
Edith Evans played Cleopatra in two different plays, Dryden’s All For Love (1922) and Shakespeare’s (1925 and 1946). If she was not meant by nature to play tragic heroines she was certainly meant to speak Shakespeare’s verse. She had a strong internal word-sense which enabled her to challenge, if she wished, the conventionally accepted colours and resonances of a famous speech. No other actress has made so much of the soliloquy in which Viola considers the possibility that her disguise has fatally charmed Olivia: in a score of lines she explored depths of comic irony that have not been hinted at since. Was there ever a Rosalind more alive than hers to the pure humour of being happily in love? Her internal word-sense served her not only in the speaking of verse. From William Poel she had learned that the voice, to be audible in a theatre, must be kept running up and down the scale. She put this serviceable general rule to highly individual comic use. She could turn a single word, the “hand-bag!” of Lady Bracknell when she hears that her prospective son-in-law has been born in one, to a wondrous crescendo of scandalized horror.
Only at the very end did Edith Evans sometimes give way to the temptation to parody her own mannerisms. At the height of her powers she was an actress of unending subtlety and perpetual surprises, compelling laughter or tears as she wished. When she burst
on the town at Hammersmith in 1924 in The Way of the World she made Millamant appear the supreme heroine of the English comic stage. Millamant has never appeared so since, though Edith Evans many years later brought that comedy to life with Lady Wishfort, appallingly funny in her stark reality, as its central character.
Born on February 8, 1888, in London, the only child of Edward Evans who was a civil servant in the Post Office and not of Welsh descent — nor was his wife Welsh — Edith Evans was apprenticed at the age of 14 to a milliner. She remarked in later years that she loved rich and beautiful materials but had nevertheless found it hard to make two hats alike. At 16 she began attending a dramatic class in Victoria Street, which developed into a club known as the Streatham Shakespeare Players. William Poel saw her play Beatrice at Streatham in 1912, and chose her for the part of Cressida in a production of his own at King’s Hall, Covent Garden, later in the same year. Immediately afterwards she gave up her milliner’s job in Wood Street, Cheapside. Her professional stage career seems in retrospect to fall into three periods, the third coinciding with a film career which began in 1948 when she was 60.
The first began with a Stage Society production of a comedy by George Moore in 1913 — Moore had intended her to play the lead in this, but was overruled —and culminated in The Way of the World at the Lyric, Hammersmith (1924). The triumph of her Millamant was founded on the experience of such early campaigns as a Shakespearian tour in Ellen Terry’s company (1918), Lady Utterword in the original Heartbreak House (1921), the first cycle of Back to Methuselah at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (1923) and special appearances for the Phoenix Society in Venice Preserv’d and All for Love and for the Stage Society in The Witch of Edmonton.
The second period covered the next 20 years, from The Way of the World at Hammersmith to the end of the Second World War, and was that of the definition of her full range as an actress: of the things she could do as well as, or better than, anyone else, and of those she could do only moderately or not at all. The positive and the negative were both adumbrated in the course of her first season at the Old Vic (1925-1926) under Andrew Leigh as director, with Mr Baliol Holloway as leading man: a season beginning with her Portia of Belmont, continuing with her Cleopatra, and ending, during the General Strike, with Beatrice — and in which, on her only free day from rehearsals, she married George Booth, a petroleum engineer. He died in 1935. Performances of absolute assurance given by Edith Evans during the second period included those in Tiger Cats (1924 and 1931), The Beaux’ Stratagem (1927 and 1930), The Lady with a Lamp (London 1929, New York 1931), The Apple Cart (1929), Evensong (London 1932, New York 1933), The Late Christopher Bean (1933), The Seagull (1936, under Komisarjevsky), Robert’s Wife (1937) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1939).
She was again seen in Wilde’s comedy during the war years, and also both at home and overseas in Heartbreak House, on this occasion as Mrs Hushabye. Other wartime appearances of hers were in two editions of the revue Diversion at Wyndham’s; in a revue at Gibraltar for the forces; in new plays by Miss Clemence Dane and Van Druten; at the Garrison Theatre, Salisbury; and in India in The Late Christopher Bean for ENSA. This period also included two ventures in management: one jointly with Leon M. Lion at Wyndham’s in 1927, opening with a short-lived comedy adapted from the French, and the other at the Prince of Wales’ in 1930. Her part in the play presented there was Delilah. She had invested all her savings in it. It ran for just three days.
Her return to London as Mrs Malaprop in September, 1945, shortly before she was created a DBE in 1946 inaugurated the third period. Though it was to include other classical parts — Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (this time opposite Godfrey Tearle) in 1946; Lady Wishfort, Mme Ranevsky and Henry VIII’s Queen for the Old Vic Company — as well as appearances in films, perhaps the most distinctive feature of these years was the quality of her work in a series of new plays: Daphne Laureola (London, 1949, New York, 1950), Waters of the Moon (1951), The Dark Is Light Enough (1954) and The Chalk Garden (1956). In 1959, she went to Stratford for the first time since 1913, to play the Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well for Tyrone Guthrie; and Volumnia to Olivier’s Coriolanus, followed in 1961 by Queen Margaret in Richard III, in which year she also played the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Roles in Hay Fever (1964) and Dear Antoine were only two in a seemingly never-ending stage career.
If she did not necessarily show new aspects of her art in these plays, she added a dimension to what was there already. Her performances were now like comments not only on human nature, but also on acting generally, on her own acting, and on herself. She told us less, and what she told us was sometimes repetitive; but in a sense it implied more than it used to do. Bridie’s Lady Pitts, Mr Fry’s Countess Rosmarin and Miss Bagnold’s Mrs St Maugham would not have been such “high women” as they seemed, unless they had felt inside them, and caused us to feel, too, the Millamant, the Rosalind, the favourite of Shaw’s King Magnus, that Edith Evans had been in her own prime.
Her film career had begun in 1948 with a version of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, followed in the same year by The Last Days of Dolwyn, written and directed by Emlyn Williams. In the cinema she was able, as in the theatre, to place her experience of life, clarified as she had said earlier, by Time, fully at the service of acting. The Importance of Being Earnest (1951) gave us another peerless performance, as Lady Bracknell, and her fourth and fifth films, Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger and Fred Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story, were both shown in 1959. Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones followed in 1963, succeeded by The Chalk Garden (1963); Young Cassidy (1965); Fitzwilly Strikes Back (1966); and Prudence and the Pill (1967).
Bryan Forbes’s film The Whisperers, in the same year, won her the best actress award at the 1967 Berlin Film Festival and later films included David Copperfield, Scrooge (both 1970); and A Doll’s House (1973). Many of her old stage roles were heard again on radio during this period and she appeared on television where a version of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler was screened by the BBC to celebrate her eightieth birthday. In the 1950s she had had honorary doctorates conferred on her by the Universities of London (1950), Cambridge (1951) and Oxford (1954).
Had Edith Evans died in her fifties, she would probably be remembered chiefly as a comedienne: for her Millamant; her Mrs Sullen; her Rosalind; for — as James Agate called it — her smile of happy deliverance on uttering an author’s wittiest conceits. Having lived long enough to show us also the pensioner subject to illusions in The Whisperers and the grandmother who lost a fortune at the tables in The Gambler — but not Lady Macbeth, a part she always refused because she found the character incredible — she deserves to be remembered not only as a comedienne, but also as an actress of the highest dedication.
Dame Edith Evans, DBE, actress, was born on February 8, 1888. She died on October 14, 1976, aged 88
CECIL WOODHAM-SMITH
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INSIGHTFUL BIOGRAPHER AND HISTORIAN OF THE VICTORIAN ERA
MARCH 17, 1977
Cecil Woodham-Smith was one of the most gifted biographers and narrative historians of her generation. She did not begin writing seriously until her children were at boarding school, and it is in the context of only four books — Florence Nightingale (1950), The Reason Why (1953), The Great Hunger (1962) and Queen Victoria (1972) — that she displayed an attention to detail, a flair for storytelling, and an historical and human intelligence that set her work apart. She was doubly fortunate in possessing both the means to take time over her work and the talent to use her good fortune wisely and well. She organized her material brilliantly.
Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith was born in April 1896, the daughter of Colonel James Fitzgerald, of the family of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, hero of the Irish Rising in 1798. Although her home was never in Ireland, she set great store by her Irish ancestry and during her time at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, her pro-Irish sympathies were much in evidence; more than thirty years later these sympathies were directed into her most somb
re and relentless work, The Great Hunger. In 1928 she married George Ivon Woodham-Smith, a lawyer of distinction who became the enthusiastic manager of her literary affairs; by him she had a son and a daughter and the marriage was exceptionally close and deep. When he died in 1968, some of the impetus behind her work died with him.
Before marriage she had written articles and short stories, and in the late 1930s wrote three pot-boiling novels under the name of Janet Gordon, but she did not begin research on Florence Nightingale until 1941. She was always a meticulous worker and the book was not ready for publication until nine years later, when it was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, its rare combination of scholarship and readability commending it to professional historians and general public alike. An authoritative life of Florence Nightingale had been long overdue, and here was one at last to do justice to the complexity — part commonsense, part saintliness — of the subject. It stands as a milestone in the reviving study of the Victorians that distinguished the middle years of our century.
The Reason Why must be seen in the same light, a brilliant analysis of that central Victorian episode, the Charge of the Light Brigade. It is constructed on the two fatally converging biographies of Lords Lucan and Cardigan, and is as memorable for its characterization of these men and their colleagues as for its grand landscape painting of Victorian society, the festering Balkans and the cruel, glittering plains of the Crimea itself; few women have written so well of armies on the march.
These two are masterpieces of refined information. If there is a slight falling-off in the two later works, it is from this very high standard and has nothing to do with accuracy or scholarship, both of which remained impeccable. It is rather because the process of documentary investigation seemed to become an absorbing pleasure in itself, sometimes at the expense of the narrative line. In The Great Hunger she was writing of the subject perhaps nearest to her heart, the distress of Ireland, and did not always know when to let well — or rather, ill — alone, and get on with the terrible tale. It remains a formidable and moving account, with a mass of invaluable matter, much of it almost parenthetical (“In Erris today there are many people who have never seen a train; in 1847 there were many who had never seen a living tree larger than a shrub”).
