Profile of Wendy Hiller on Famous Like Me

Dame Wendy Hiller (August 15, 1912 – May 14, 2003) was a distinguished English film and stage actress. The Oscar-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 Wendy Margaret Hiller in Cheshire, England, the daughter of Frank Watkin Hiller and Marie Stone, her professional debut as an actress was in repertory at Manchester in the early 1930s. She first found success in the stage version of Love on the Dole in 1936. She married the play's author Ronald Gow the following year. The popularity of Love on the Dole took the production to New York, 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. 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.

Her impressive film debut in Pygmalion earned her a first Oscar nomination in 1938 for her role as Eliza Doolittle. She followed up this success with another Shaw adaptation, Major Barbara, in 1941, and starred in the 1945 Powell & Pressburger classic I Know Where I'm Going!. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1958 for the film Separate Tables, as a lonely hotel manageress and was nominated again in 1966 for her performance as Dame Alice (wife of Sir Thomas More) in A Man for All Seasons. The southern gothic Toys in the Attic (1963) earned her a Golden Globe nomination as a doting spinster sister. The tragic and abused colonial wife in Outcast of the Islands (1952), the possessive mother in Sons and Lovers (1960), the wonderfully grotesque Russian princess in Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and the formidable hospital matron in The Elephant Man (1980) were also considered particularly memorable.

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 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 (1946), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1946), The Heiress (1947 Broadway, 1950 West End), Waters of the Moon (1951/52), Flowering Cherry (1958 London, 1959 Broadway) and The Aspern Papers (1962 Broadway). She was nominated for Broadway's Tony Award in 1958 as Best Dramatic Actress for her performance in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten.

As she matured, a strong affinity for the plays of Henrik Ibsen was demonstrated in When We Dead Awaken (1968), as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts (1972) and as Gunhild in John Gabriel Borkman (1975), in which she appeared with Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft. As Queen Mary in the 1972 West End success Crown Matrimonial she proved she was not limited to playing dejected, emotionally deprived women. Some earlier plays were later revisited as older characters such as West End revivals of Waters of the Moon (1978) with Ingrid Bergman and The Aspern Papers (1984) with Vanessa Redgrave.

Wendy Hiller was made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1975 . Regarded as one of Britain's great dramatic talents, her style was disciplined and unpretentious, and she disliked personal publicity. The writer Sheridan Morley described Dame Wendy as being remarkable in her "extreme untheatricality until the house lights went down, whereupon she would deliver a performance of breathtaking reality and expertise".

Dame Wendy's final West End performance was the title role in Driving Miss Daisy in 1988. 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). She eventually retired from acting in 1992. She died at her home in Beaconsfield, England in 2003 at the age of 90.

Filmography

• Lancashire Luck (1937)
• Pygmalion (1938)
• Major Barbara (1941)
• I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
• Outcast of the Islands (1952)
• Single-Handed (USA: Sailor of the King) (1953)
• How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957)
• Something of Value (1957)
• Separate Tables (1958)
• Sons and Lovers (1960)
• Toys in the Attic (1963)
• A Man for All Seasons (1966)
• Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
• Voyage of the Damned (1976)
• The Cat and The Canary (1978)
• The Elephant Man (1980)
• Making Love (1982)
• Attracta (1983)
• The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987)

Selected TV

• David Copperfield (1969)
• Clochemerle (1972)
• Richard II (1978)
• Country (1981)
• Miss Morrison's Ghosts (1981)
• The Kingfisher (1982)
• Witness for the Prosecution (1982)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (1985)
• The Death of the Heart (1985)
• All Passion Spent (1986)
• Anne Of Green Gables: The Sequel (1987)
• A Taste for Death (1988)
• Ending Up (1989)
• The Best Of Friends (1991)
• The Countess Alice (1992)

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