DAME WENDY HILLERDame Wendy Hiller, who died on May 14 2003, was an Oscar-winning English stage actress who gathered acclaim for her Eliza Doolittle.Dame Wendy had always longed to be an actress and eventually joined a repertory company where she would have been content to make the tea or being the occasional understudy. But it was her accent that brought her a breakthrough.Unlike other many stage actresses of her generation, she rarely tackled Shakespeare, preferring more modern dramatists such as George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen.She was principally a stage actress, often playing headstrong women, making relatively few films during a 50-year career, but she left an indelible impression in many of them, especially her second feature film, Pygmalion.Wendy Margaret Hiller was born at Hazel Grove-cum-Bramhall, Cheshire, on 15 August, 1912, the only daughter of Frank Watkin Hiller, a cotton mill manager, and his wife Marie. Dame Wendy, who had three brothers, was sent to school at Winceby House in Sussex; her father thought she would never find a husband unless she lost her Lancashire accent.At the age of 18 she joined the Manchester Repertory Theatre and kept herself busy with minor roles. After four years she was sacked. Soon afterwards the rep was producing Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole and needed an actress with an authentic Lancastrian accent for the leading lady, Sally Hardcastle.Dame Wendy was recalled and Love on the Dole went on a long northern tour before reaching the Garrick Theatre, London, in 1935, and the Shubert Theater, New York, in 1936.The Sunday Times critic James Agate thought she was magnificent: “The play moved me terribly and must move anybody who still has about him that old-fashioned thing — a heart,” he wrote. It brought her to the attention of George Bernard Shaw, who invited her to play Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, and the title role of Saint Joan .Public success came, as did private happiness. In 1937 Dame Wendy married Ronald Gow, who had adapted Love on The Dole for the stage.Shaw insisted that Dame Wendy play Eliza in the 1938 film version of Pygmalion, opposite Leslie Howard as Henry Higgins. Dame Wendy was nominated for an Academy Award. A projected film of Saint Joan fell through, but she took the starring role in another Shaw film: Major Barbara (1941). It was an ambitious project, filmed during the Blitz, and cuts demanded by the distributors left it weak.In 1945 she played the strong-willed Scottish heroine — in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! — who finds that love is more important than position and money.West End and Broadway stage successes included Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1946), Waters of the Moon (1951), The Aspern Papers with Vanessa Redgrave) (1962), The Wings of the Dove (1963), and The Sacred Flame (1967). In 1958 she was nominated for a Tony Award as best dramatic actress for her performance as Josie Hogan in Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.Later appearances concentrated on Ibsen, including roles as Irene in When We Dead Awaken (Cambridge, 1968), Mrs Alving in Ghosts (Edinburgh, 1972), Aase in Peer Gynt (BBC, 1972) and Gunhild in John Gabriel Borkman (Old Vic, 1975). Her final West End performance was the title role in Driving Miss Daisy in 1988.She won an Oscar for best supporting actress as Miss Cooper, the lonely hotel manager, in 1958’s Separate Tables . She gained another Oscar nomination eight years later for her role of Alice More in A Man for All Seasons .She rarely appeared on television although notable exceptions included an episode of Z Cars in the 1960s, Mme Putet in the French satire Clochemerle, and, in 1986, Lady Slane in All Passion Spent, for which she gained a Bafta award nomination and the best actress award from the Broadcasting Press Guild.Dame Wendy was far removed from the actressy archetype and preferred to be with her family or in her garden. Of her performance in Driving Miss Daisy, she commented: “Luckily, West End audiences seem to rather like very old people. They think, ‘My God, we saw her acting in the war and there she is still doing it,’ and mentally they give you a sort of prize for sheer survival, as long as you turn up every night and remember most of the lines. Not that it ever gets any easier to do.”
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