Wendy Hiller
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| Wendy Hiller | |
 in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) |
|
| Birth name | Wendy Margaret Hiller |
| Born | August 15, 1912 Bramhall, Stockport, England |
| Died | May 14, 2003 aged 90 Beaconsfield, England |
| Spouse(s) | Ronald Gow (1937-1993) |
| Academy Awards | |
|---|---|
| Best Supporting Actress 1958 Separate Tables |
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Dame Wendy Margaret Hiller DBE (August 15, 1912 – May 14, 2003) was a distinguished English film and stage actress. The Academy Award-winning actress enjoyed a varied acting career that spanned nearly sixty years. Despite many notable film performances, she chose to remain primarily a stage actress.
Born in Bramhall, Stockport, in Cheshire, the daughter of Frank Watkin Hiller and Marie Stone, she began her professional career as an actress in repertory at Manchester in the early 1930s. She first found success as Sally Hardcastle in the stage version of Love on the Dole in 1934. This play also saw her West End debut in 1935, and she married the play's author Ronald Gow in 1937. In the early 1940s they moved to Beaconsfield, where they had two children and lived together until Gow's death in 1993.
Regarded as one of Britain's great dramatic talents, she was created an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1971 and raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1975. Her style was disciplined and unpretentious, and she disliked personal publicity. The writer Sheridan Morley described Hiller as being remarkable in her "extreme untheatricality until the house lights went down, whereupon she would deliver a performance of breathtaking reality and expertise".
She died of natural causes at her home in Beaconsfield, aged 90. Dame Wendy was cremated.
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[edit] Stage career
The popularity of Love on the Dole took the production to New York in 1936, where her performance attracted the attention of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw cast her in several of his plays, including Saint Joan, Pygmalion and Major Barbara. She was reputed to be Shaw's favorite actress of the time. Unlike other stage actresses of her generation, she did relatively little Shakespeare, preferring the more modern dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen and new plays adapted from the novels of Henry James and Thomas Hardy among others.
In the course of her stage career, Wendy Hiller won popular and critical acclaim in both London and New York. She excelled at rather plain but strong willed characters. After touring England as Viola in Twelfth Night (1943) she returned to the West End to be directed by John Gielgud in Cradle Song (1944). The string of notable successes continued with The First Gentleman (1945), Playboy of the Western World (Bristol Old Vic, 1946) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1946), which was adapted for the stage by Ronald Gow.
In 1947, Wendy Hiller originated the role of Catherine Sloper, the painfully shy, vulnerable spinster in The Heiress on Broadway. The play, based on the Henry James novel Washington Square , also featured Basil Rathbone as her emotionally abusive father. The production enjoyed a year-long run at the Biltmore Theater in New York and would prove to be her greatest triumph on Broadway. Olivia de Havilland would later win the Oscar for the role in the film version in 1949. Upon returning to London, Hiller again played the role in the West End production in 1950.
Her stage work remained a priority and continued with Ann Veronica (1949), a two year run in Waters of the Moon (1951/52) on the West End, Flowering Cherry (1958 London, 1959 Broadway), The Aspern Papers (1962 Broadway), The Wings of the Dove (1963), and The Sacred Flame (1967). She was nominated for Broadway's Tony Award in 1958 as Best Dramatic Actress for her performance as Josie Hogan in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten.
As she matured, she demonstrated a strong affinity for the plays of Henrik Ibsen, as Irene in When We Dead Awaken (Cambridge, 1968), as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts (Edinburgh, 1972), Aase in Peer Gynt (BBC, 1972) and as Gunhild in John Gabriel Borkman (Old Vic, 1975), in which she appeared with Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft. Later West End triumphs such as Queen Mary in Crown Matrimonial (1972) proved she was not limited to playing dejected, emotionally deprived women. She later revisited some earlier plays playing older characters, as in West End revivals of Waters of the Moon (1977 Chichester Festival, 1978 West End) with Ingrid Bergman and The Aspern Papers (1984) with Vanessa Redgrave. Her final West End performance was the title role in Driving Miss Daisy in 1988.
[edit] Film career
At Shaw's insistence, she starred as Eliza Doolittle in the film Pygmalion (1938) with Leslie Howard as Professor Higgins. This performance earned her her first Oscar nomination and became one of her most famous film roles. She followed up this success with another Shaw adaptation, Major Barbara with Rex Harrison and Robert Morley, in 1941, and starred in the 1945 Powell & Pressburger classic I Know Where I'm Going!. She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1959 for the film Separate Tables (1958), as a lonely hotel manageress, a role she had played on stage. She received a third Oscar nomination for her performance as Dame Alice (wife of Sir Thomas More) in A Man for All Seasons (1966). The southern gothic Toys in the Attic (1963) earned her a Golden Globe nomination as a doting spinster sister. Her portrayals of a tragic and abused colonial wife in Outcast of the Islands (1952), a possessive mother in Sons and Lovers (1960), a class-conscious Russian princess in Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and a formidable hospital matron in The Elephant Man (1980) were also considered memorable.
Other film work includes:
- Lancashire Luck (1937)
- Single-Handed (USA: Sailor of the King) (1953)
- How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957)
- Something of Value (1957)
- Voyage of the Damned (1976)
- The Cat and the Canary (1979)
- Making Love (1982)
- Attracta (1983)
- The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987)
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Miyoshi Umeki for Sayonara |
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress 1958 for Separate Tables |
Succeeded by Shelley Winters for The Diary of Anne Frank |
[edit] Television career
Hiller appeared on the children's TV programme Jackanory, reading the stories of Alison Uttley. She made many notable television appearances in the 1980s, including Miss Morrison's Ghosts (1981) and the BBC dramatization of the Vita Sackville-West novel All Passion Spent (1986). Her last appearance, before retiring from acting, was the title role in The Countess Alice (1992) with Zoe Wanamaker.
Other TV roles include:
- David Copperfield (1969)
- Clochemerle (1972)
- Richard II (1978)
- Country (1981)
- The Kingfisher (1982)
- Witness for the Prosecution (1982)
- The Importance of Being Earnest (1985)
- The Death of the Heart (1985)
- Anne of Avonlea (1987)
- A Taste for Death (1988)
- Ending Up (1989)
- The Best Of Friends (1991)
[edit] External links
- Wendy Hiller at the Internet Movie Database
- Wendy Hiller at the TCM Movie Database
- Wendy Hiller at the Internet Broadway Database
- Wendy Hiller at screenonline
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wendy Hiller |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Actress |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 15, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bramhall, Cheshire, England |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 14, 2003 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Beaconsfield, England |
