It’s been a bad month for show biz! Cut down from today’s Daily Telegraph:
Dame Wendy Hiller, who died on Wednesday aged 90, was an actress who was adored by Shaw and won an Oscar, but kept her distance from the mainstream of British theatre, in which she flourished for more than half a century . . . What ultimately made her career so remarkable was its quiet success on both sides of the Atlantic and her ability to shuttle for nearly 60 years between queens and peasant women without a glimmer of pretence.
Sheridan Morley writes: “In one sense, Wendy was a kind of anti-star: one husband, one house (in Beaconsfield), one family. Although she did occasionally travel to Hollywood (notably in 1958 for Separate Tables) and Broadway (where her greatest success was in The Aspern Papers in 1962), she lived a relatively domestic life. Her territory was regional England and, of course, Shaw; she landed the film of Pygmalion in 1936 after he had seen her on stage at the Malvern Festival where she played her first Major Barbara. Like Peggy Ashcroft, whom she often followed into classical roles, Wendy abhorred any personal publicity; as an actress she could break your heart by her voice alone, but there was a steely centre to her Cheshire heart. What was remarkable about her was her extreme untheatricality until the house lights went down, whereupon she would give a performance of breathtaking reality and expertise: few who saw it will forget her at the very opening of the National Theatre with Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft in John Gabriel Borkman.”