Dame Wendy Margaret Hiller, DBE (15 August 1912 – 14 May 2003) was an English film and stage actress, who enjoyed a varied acting career that spanned nearly sixty years. The writer Joel Hirschhorn, in his 1984 compilation Rating the Movie Stars, described her as "a no-nonsense actress who literally took command of the screen whenever she appeared on film". Despite many notable film performances, she chose to remain primarily a stage actress. **She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Separate Tables (1958).

*1941 Major Barbara

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16/06/2019

Wendy Hiller : Actress

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1. Profile :

Wendy Hiller
DBE
Wendy Hiller in Sailor of the King.jpg
*Hiller in Sailor of the King (1953)

Born Wendy Margaret Hiller
15 August 1912
Bramhall, Cheshire, England
Died 14 May 2003 (aged 90)
Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England
Resting place St Mary Churchyard, Radnage, Buckinghamshire, England
Years active 1935–1993
Spouse(s) Ronald Gow
(m. 1937; his death 1993)

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2. Introduction :

Dame Wendy Margaret Hiller, DBE (15 August 1912 – 14 May 2003) was an English film and stage actress, who enjoyed a varied acting career that spanned nearly sixty years. The writer Joel Hirschhorn, in his 1984 compilation Rating the Movie Stars, described her as "a no-nonsense actress who literally took command of the screen whenever she appeared on film". Despite many notable film performances, she chose to remain primarily a stage actress.

**She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Separate Tables (1958).

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3. Early years :

Born in Bramhall, Cheshire, the daughter of Frank Watkin Hiller, a Manchester cotton manufacturer, and Marie Stone, Hiller began her professional career as an actress in repertory at Manchester in the early 1930s. She first found success as slum dweller Sally Hardcastle in the stage version of Love on the Dole in 1934. The play was an enormous success and toured the regional stages of Britain. This play saw her West End debut in 1935 at the Garrick Theatre. She married the play's author Ronald Gow, fifteen years her senior, in 1937 (the same year as she made her film debut in Lancashire Luck, scripted by Gow).

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4. Career : I. Stage :

The huge 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 recognised a spirited radiance in the young actress, which was ideally suited for playing his heroines. Shaw cast her in several of his plays, including Saint Joan, Pygmalion and Major Barbara and his influence on her early career is clearly apparent. She was reputed to be Shaw's favourite 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, Hiller won popular and critical acclaim in both London and New York. She excelled at rather plain but strong willed characters. After touring Britain as Viola in Twelfth Night (1943) she returned to the West End to be directed by John Gielgud as Sister Joanna in The Cradle Song (Apollo, 1944). The string of notable successes continued as Princess Charlotte in The First Gentleman (Savoy, 1945) opposite Robert Morley as the Prince Regent, Pegeen in Playboy of the Western World (Bristol Old Vic, 1946) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Bristol Old Vic, 1946, transferring to the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End in 1947), which was adapted for the stage by her husband.

In 1947, 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 Theatre in New York and would prove to be her greatest triumph on Broadway. On 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 (Piccadilly, 1949), which was adapted by Gow from the novel by H. G. Wells[2] with his wife in the leading role. She did a two-year run in N. C. Hunter's Waters of the Moon (Haymarket, 1951–52), alongside Sybil Thorndike and Edith Evans. A season at the Old Vic in 1955–56 produced a notable performance as Portia in Julius Caesar among others. Other stage work at this time included The Night of the Ball (New Theatre, 1955), the new Robert Bolt play Flowering Cherry (Haymarket, 1958, Broadway, 1959), Toys in the Attic (Piccadilly, 1960), The Wings of the Dove (Lyric, 1963), A Measure of Cruelty (Birmingham Repertory, 1965), A Present for the Past (Edinburgh, 1966), The Sacred Flame (Duke of York's, 1967) with Gladys Cooper, The Battle of Shrivings (Lyric, 1970) with John Gielgud and Lies (Albery, 1975).

In 1957, Hiller returned to New York to star as Josie Hogan in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, a performance which gained her a Tony Award nomination as Best Dramatic Actress. The production also featured Cyril Cusack and Franchot Tone. Her final appearance on Broadway was as Miss Tina in the 1962 production of Michael Redgrave's adaptation of The Aspern Papers, from the Henry James novella.

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 (National Theatre Company, Old Vic, 1975), in which she appeared with Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft. Later West End successes such as Queen Mary in Crown Matrimonial (Haymarket, 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 (Chichester, 1977, Haymarket, 1978) with Ingrid Bergman and The Aspern Papers (Haymarket, 1984) with Vanessa Redgrave. She was scheduled to return to the American stage in a 1982 revival of Anastasia with Natalie Wood, until Wood's death just weeks before rehearsals. Hiller made her final West End performance in the title role in Driving Miss Daisy (Apollo, 1988).

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4.II. Film career :

Scott Sunderland, Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller in Pygmalion (1938)
At Shaw's insistence, she starred as Eliza Doolittle in the film Pygmalion (1938) with Leslie Howard as Professor Higgins. This performance earned Hiller her first Oscar nomination, a first for a British actress in a British film, and became one of her best remembered roles. She was also the first actress to utter the word "bloody" in a British film, when Eliza utters the line "Not bloody likely, I'm going in a taxi!".

*Hiller, ca. 1939

She followed up this success with another Shaw adaptation, Major Barbara (1941) with Rex Harrison and Robert Morley. Powell and Pressburger signed her for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), but her second pregnancy led to Deborah Kerr being cast instead. Determined to work with Hiller, the film makers later cast her with Roger Livesey again for I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), another classic of British cinema.

Despite her early film success and offers from Hollywood, she returned to the stage full-time after 1945 and only occasionally accepted film roles. With her return to film in the 1950s, she portrayed an abused colonial wife in Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands (1952), but had already transitioned into mature, supporting roles with Sailor of the King (1953) and a memorable victim of the Mau Mau uprising in Something of Value (1957). She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1959 for the film Separate Tables (1958), as a lonely hotel manager and mistress of Burt Lancaster. She remained uncompromising in her indifference to film stardom, as evidenced by her surprising reaction to her Oscar win: "Never mind the honour, cold hard cash is what it means to me." She received a BAFTA nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the domineering, possessive mother in Sons and Lovers (1960). She reprised her London stage role in the southern gothic Toys in the Attic (1963), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination as the elder spinster sister in a film which also starred Dean Martin and Geraldine Page.

She received a third Oscar nomination for her performance as the simple, unrefined, but dignified Lady Alice More, opposite Paul Scofield as Thomas More, in A Man for All Seasons (1966). Her role as the grand Russian princess in a huge commercial success, Murder on the Orient Express (1974), won her international acclaim and the Evening Standard British Film Award as Best Actress. Other notable roles included a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi Germany with her dying husband in Voyage of the Damned (1976), the formidable London Hospital matron in The Elephant Man (1980) and Maggie Smith's emotionally cold and demanding aunt in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987).

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4.III. Television career :

Hiller made numerous television appearances, in both Britain and the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, she performed in episodes of American drama series such as Studio One and Alfred Hitchcock Presents among others. In 1965, she starred in an episode of the acclaimed dramatic series Profiles in Courage (1965), in which she played Anne Hutchinson, a free-thinking woman charged with heresy in Colonial America. In Britain, during the 1960s, she appeared in the drama series Play of the Month, as well as on the children's TV programme Jackanory, reading the stories of Alison Uttley.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she appeared in many television films including a memorable Duchess of York in the BBC Television Shakespeare production of Richard II (1978), the irascible Edwardian Oxford academic in Miss Morrison's Ghosts (1981) and the BBC dramatisations of Julian Gloag's Only Yesterday (1986) and the Vita Sackville-West novel All Passion Spent (1986), in which she was the quietly defiant Lady Slane. This performance earned her a BAFTA nomination as Best Actress. Her last appearance, before retiring from acting, was the title role in The Countess Alice (1992), a BBC/WGBH-Boston television film with Zoë Wanamaker.

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5. Personal life :

*Hiller in later years

In the early 1940s, Hiller and husband Ronald Gow moved to Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where they brought up two children, Ann (1939–2006) and Anthony (b. 1942), and lived together in the house called "Spindles" (now demolished). Ronald Gow died in 1993, but Hiller continued living at their home until her death a decade later. When not performing on stage or screen, she lived a completely private domestic life, insisting on being referred to as Mrs. Gow rather than by her stage name.

Regarded as one of Britain's great dramatic talents, she was awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1971 and raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1975.

In 1984, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester. In 1996, Hiller was honoured by the London Film Critics Circle with the Dilys Powell Award for excellence in British film. 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."

Wendy Hiller Grave

Despite a busy professional career, throughout her life she continually took an active interest in aspiring young actors by supporting local amateur drama societies, as well as being the president of the Chiltern Shakespeare Company until her death. Chronic ill health necessitated her eventual retirement from acting in 1992. She spent the last decade of her life in quiet retirement at her home in Beaconsfield, where she died of natural causes at the age of 90.

6. Filmography :

I. Film :

Year Title Role Notes

1937 Lancashire Luck Betty Lovejoy

*1938 Pygmalion Eliza Doolittle Nominated — "Academy Award for Best Actress"

*1941 Major Barbara

1945 I Know Where I'm Going! Joan Webster
1952 Outcast of the Islands Mrs. Almayer
1953 Sailor of the King Lucinda Bentley also known as Single-Handed
1957 Something of Value Elizabeth McKenzie Newton
How to Murder a Rich Uncle Edith Clitterburn

1958 Separate Tables Pat Cooper Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress
Nominated — Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture
Nominated — Laurel Award for Top Female Supporting Performance

1960 Sons and Lovers Gertrude Morel Nominated — BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role

1963 Toys in the Attic Anna Berniers Nominated — Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture\

*1966 A Man for All Seasons Alice More Nominated — "Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress"

Nominated — Laurel Award for Top Female Supporting Performance

1974 Murder on the Orient Express Princess Dragomiroff Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress

1976 Voyage of the Damned Rebecca Weiler
1979 The Cat and the Canary Allison Crosby
1980 The Elephant Man Mothershead
1981 Miss Morrison's Ghosts Miss Elizabeth Morrison
1982 Making Love Winnie Bates
1983 Attracta Attracta
1987 The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne Aunt D'Arcy

*1992 The Countess Alice Countess Alice von Holzendorf (final film role)*

II. Television :

Year Title Role Notes
1969 David Copperfield Mrs. Micawber

1969 The Growing Summer Aunt Dymphna Silver medal at 1969 Venice Film Festival

1972 Clochemerle Justine Putet
1978 Richard II Duchess of York
1979 Edward the Conqueror - Tales of the unexpected, Roald Dahl Louisa
1980 The Curse of King Tut's Tomb Princess Vilma
1981 Play for Today Lady Carlion "Country"
1982 The Kingfisher Evelyn
1982 Witness for the Prosecution Janet Mackenzie
1985 The Importance of Being Earnest Lady Bracknell
1985 The Death of the Heart Matchett
1986 Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy Princess Victoria as Dame Wendy Hiller
1986 Only Yesterday May Darley from the novel by Julian Gloag

1986 All Passion Spent Lady Slane Nominated — British Academy Television Award for Best Actress

1987 Anne of Avonlea Mrs. Harris as Dame Wendy Hiller
1988 A Taste for Death Lady Ursula Berowne
1989 Ending Up Adela
1991 The Best of Friends Laurentia McLachlan

7.Awards and nominations :
7.1.Academy Awards :

Year Category Work Result Winner

1967 Best Supporting Actress A man for all seasons Nominated Sandy Dennis (Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?)
1959 Separate Tables Won ---

*Actress. One of Britain's finest actresses who had a 50-year career as a stage star and Oscar-winning film actress. Dame Wendy Hiller was a tall, handsome woman with regal bearing and a rich, distinctive voice. In later years she was frequently cast in aristocratic roles. She won her best supporting actress Oscar for the 1958 film "Separate Tables."

THE END

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Dame Wendy Hiller : 12:02 AM BST 16 May 2003 : The 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.

She came from the north of England where her father was a Manchester cotton manufacturer and was sent to school in the south of England to eradicate a northern accent - not to assist her theatrical career (she had never thought of that until success was thrust upon her in a play called Love On The Dole), but because it was supposed that a regional accent would tell against her chances of marrying.

In fact she married a northern schoolmaster, Ronald Gow, who had written Love On The Dole, the play which brought her sudden fame. George Bernard Shaw set the seal on her reputation after seeing her in Gow's huge success.

He invited her in 1936 to act at the Malvern Festival in two of his plays, Pygmalion and Saint Joan. From then on she never looked back, although she did not follow the conventional path to success through the Old Vic or Stratford-upon-Avon or by joining a fashionable classical company.

Instead, she built up a following of her own in Shavian plays and films, in Ibsen, and in modern adaptations (some by her husband) of novels by Walter Greenwood, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and others.

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Related Articles : Luise Rainer 30 Dec 2014

Her great quality as an actress was to be able to indicate innocence and emotional integrity without dullness. Her voice, which had so troubled her father, became her greatest dramatic asset. It had a quaver and a slight stutter which caught the imagination and its sincerity of tone made her incapable of taking roles which called for falsehood.

If there is something of the Pygmalion legend in her progress from the portrayal of peasant girls to regal figures such as Queen Mary in Crown Matrimonial, the Countess in the film of Murder on the Orient Express and (in 1988 at the Apollo) the august old lady in Driving Miss Daisy, a gentle American geriatric comedy, two other legends touch upon the life of this unspoiled and, by modern standards, unambitious actress.

First, in 1934, she became in her native Cheshire the local girl who had gone to the big city and made good. The next year, she became the unknown provincial actress who, given her first chance in London, won national fame in a big hit.

What set her art apart from most of her contemporaries' was its lack of sophistication. Wendy Hiller was never star-struck. She had no fiery urge to be famous. She let others attend to her professional career, and when they did not, it languished, but she never minded much because the theatre was not the be-all and end-all of her life.

She did not, and she knew it, possess that physical beauty which, particularly in the 1930s, a young actress needed to get on; but many, particularly Gow and Bernard Shaw, nonetheless recognised her spiritual radiance, which was to light up so many characters, particularly Sarah Hardcastle, Tess, Joan of Arc, Major Barbara and Eliza Doolittle.

Wendy Hiller was born at Bramhall, Cheshire, on August 15 1912, the daughter of Frank Watkin and Marie Hiller. She was sent to school at Winceby House, Bexhill, where she got a taste for acting and won a voice contest at Hastings - as, she later said, the best of a bad bunch.

At 18 she joined the Manchester Repertory Theatre as a student. She played small parts, understudied the principals and became assistant stage manager. Nobody took much notice of her for the first four years - until she played Sarah Hardcastle in Love On The Dole, Gow's adaptation, with Walter Greenwood, of Greenwood's North Country novel about the Depression. In this play Wendy Hiller toured and triumphed in London and New York.

At the age of 24, on the slender reputation of one role, she became a leader of her profession. Shaw, having seen her as Sally Hardcastle, appreciated her natural qualities, and beckoned her to the Malvern Festival in 1936 where she gave excellent accounts of his Saint Joan and Eliza Doolittle.

In 1937 she and Gow, whom she had by then married, tried their luck in films. He wrote propaganda scenarios during the Second World War, and with Pygmalion and Major Barbara she began a film career which, though disjointed, was to bring her an Academy Award for her performance in Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables.

It was, however, with Robert Morley in the play about George IV, The First Gentleman, that Wendy Hiller's range began to show itself. She played Princess Charlotte in Norman Ginsbury's effective drama, and though Morley characteristically made it a vehicle for himself, Wendy Hiller's sincerity made a striking contrast.

The next season, as the heroine of her husband's new version of Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, she established herself as one of the West End's most promising young players. Her insight into Tess's unrequited passion touched the heart without apparent effort in this import from the Bristol Old Vic and was a big success.

Her voice, with its quavering, halting quality, sometimes fluted and sometimes crooned, sounded unfailingly authentic in its West Country inflections and her air of peasant simplicity was unforgettable.

Within a few months she was in New York playing the wretched spinster Catherine Sloper in The Heiress, adapted from Henry James. She did so well that when Peggy Ashcroft had to leave the subsequent London production Wendy Hiller replaced her.

Ronald Gow's next vehicle for his wife after Tess was a commercial failure, perhaps because it incurred a degree of miscasting, since H G Wells's character Ann Veronica had political and intellectual powers scarcely suited to the public idea of Wendy Hiller.

In 1951, with actresses of the calibre of Sybil Thorndike and Edith Evans, she made a personal success in a small part in Waters of the Moon. While both dames still had a notable night, Wendy Hiller's contribution in that long-runner was vivid. In a revival at Chichester in 1978 she quietly made more of the Sybil Thorndike role she was now playing than had Dame Sybil herself - knitting and sniffing, scoffing and scowling at the unwelcome visitors in this insubstantial but actable comedy.

Meanwhile, however, she had proved herself most sensationally royal in Royce Ryton's re-creation for the stage of the abdication crisis, Crown Matrimonial (1972). This was a brilliantly poised performance and a surprise to many admirers who never supposed this actress capable of such majestic haughtiness and regality.

Her acting in two Ibsen plays, When We Dead Awaken (1968) and Ghosts (1972), had, though, shown powers which were to be confirmed with Ralph Richardson at the National in John Gabriel Borkman (1975). She had by then acquired a mode of theatrical address which involved, in its leisurely, intimidating style, a pursing of the lips, a deep intake of breath and a tendency to speak extremely slowly. This could be comic or tragic or faintly laborious but it served the actress in her senior years time and again.

Her Miss Bordereau in a revival of The Aspern Papers (1984) achieved a certain awe without erasing eerie memories of Beatrix Lehmann and, though Wendy Hiller's Lady Bracknell (1987) both at Watford and the Royalty, was commendably incapable of being rushed, the graciousness suffered from a deliberation of speech which sounded laboured rather than languid.

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.

Her other films included parts in A Man for All Seasons, David Lynch's dramatic version of The Elephant Man, with John Hurt, and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.

She was appointed OBE in 1971 and DBE in 1975.

She and Ronald Gow, who died in 1993, had a son and a daughter.

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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 theatricality 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.

Once, interviewing her for BBC radio, I asked how she wanted to be remembered, if at all. "Oh, I think a little posterity must always be nice," she replied. "After I'm dead I'll probably be a cult and they'll have entire seasons of me at the National Film Theatre. Thank God I won't have to watch them all."

In a profession where this is rare, Wendy was a genuinely good woman: she approached her acting as a craft and her life as far more important than her work. In a last decade spent very largely as an invalid, she had the devotion of her two children and those of us who loved her either in private or public - sometimes both.

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Hiller, Wendy (1912-2003) :  BFI Screenonline

 Actor

*Image of Hiller, Wendy (1912-2003)

There was simply no one like Wendy Hiller in British films: her sculpted, unconventionally beautiful face, distinctive voice and the intelligent intensity of her playing marked her as exceptional.

Essentially a stage actress, she made only fifteen cinema films in fifty years but how choice so many of them were: in Anthony Asquith's Pygmalion (1938), she was the definitive Eliza for a generation, receiving an Oscar nomination; in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), she is irresistibly engaging and finally touching as the headstrong heroine losing her grip on her life when she falls in love - and though she hated working with director Michael Powell; in Separate Tables (US, d. Delbert Mann, 1958), she won an Oscar for her supporting role as the lonely, generous hotel manager; she is D.H. Lawrence's bitter, passionate Mrs Morel to the life in Sons and Lovers (d. Jack Cardiff, 1960); very moving as the great-hearted, simple Alice More in A Man for All Seasons (d. Fred Zinnemann, 1965, another Oscar nomination); making bricks from Agatha Christie's straw as the Princess in Murder on the Orient Express (d. Sidney Lumet, 1974); and austerely dominant as Auntie in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (d. Jack Clayton, 1987), her screen swansong.

Alongside this gallery is a great stage career, begun in Manchester in 1930, and brought to early notice with the role of Sally in her husband (1937-93), Ronald Gow's play, Love on the Dole in 1934, repeating the role on Broadway to which she would often return.

It was her playing of St Joan and Pygmalion at the Malvern Festival which led Shaw to recommend her for the lead in the films of Pygmalion and Major Barbara (d. Gabriel Pascal, 1941). She had enormous successes in classical plays (as in her Old Vic season, 1955-56) and such new plays as The Heiress (1950) and Flowering Cherry (1958).

On TV, she chose with similar care and to similar effect, her range encompassing the outraged spinster of Clochemerle (BBC, 1972) and the wise, humane Lady Slane, who, All Passion Spent (BBC, 1986), is determined to remake her life in widowhood.

Most actors have to put up with a certain amount of dross; Wendy Hiller seems to have avoided it. She was made OBE in 1971 and DBE in 1975.

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