The Realist

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Obit from The Guardian (UK)

Dame Wendy Hiller, who has died aged 90, was stage-struck from the word go. It
was the atmosphere, the teamwork - being there was everything.
So in 1930 she joined the Manchester Repertory Theatre, Britain's first such
company. As a student, young Wendy was proud to be a dogsbody. Whatever came
her way she did with a will: sweeping the stage, making the tea, setting the
scenery, prompting, walking on.

What could be better? But one day she was sacked, and went home to Bramhall,
Cheshire, to mope.

However, by chance, one of the company had adapted a book. Walter Greenwood's
novel Love On The Dole was set in the Depression; and the heroine needed a good
Lancashire accent. Hadn't the girl they had just fired been good at that sort
of thing?

After touring from May to November 1934 in Ronald Gow's adaptation, she became
famous overnight when the play moved to London (in 1935) and New York (in
1936). It was the authenticity of her northern speech that did it: that and her
frank, matter-of-fact manner as Sally Hardcastle, the mill girl ready to face a
fate worse than death rather than have her family go hungry.

Not that the actor herself came from a poor family. Her father was a prominent
cotton manufacturer, who had believed that unless she was rid of her Lancashire
accent she stood no chance of marrying; so she had been dispatched to Winceby
House school, Bexhill, to lose it.

In the London run, James Agate judged her Sally Hardcastle "magnificent". The
play "moved me terribly and must move anybody who still has about him that old-
fashioned thing - a heart". And the fate worse than death? It was Sally's
acceptance of an offer from a married bookmaker to provide for her and her
family if she became his nominal housekeeper. In 1937, the actor in fact
married her author, Ronald Gow, and her film triumph as Eliza Doolittle in
Pygmalion (1938) came after playing both that role and Saint Joan at the
Malvern festival for Bernard Shaw in 1936.

Whether it was her voice that made her fortune with its inimitable earthy
quality, at once gritty and quavering, tremulous but clear in its deliberative
phrasing, or whether the direct, no-nonsense northern personality of a girl to
whom success came almost inadvertently, her temperament was to make all her
acting seem honest, open, trustworthy and unaffected. This air of emotional
integrity was to compel our attention for the next half century. Yet her
speech, with its peasant inflections and hesitations, was crucial because its
regional range was so hard to pin down - Lancashire for Sally Hardcastle, Bow
Bells for Eliza Doolittle and Hardy's Wessex for Tess Of The D'Urbervilles.

This was her next triumph. Again, the adaptation was by Ronald Gow, and to my
mind it was her finest stage performance. In its sensibility, sincerity,
passion and tragic power, there was nothing on the London stage to match it. It
came for a week to St Martin's Lane from the Bristol Old Vic in 1946, returning
for a West End run in 1947. And though Gow deserved high praise for his
handling of the novel, it was his wife who stole all our hearts with her rustic
simplicity and emotional truth.

This ability to express transparent honesty astonished everyone. It was so
hard, as one critic observed, not to believe in her. An actor may harbour heaps
of personal sincerity, but unless she can transmit it to us she might as well
be without it.

What continued to impress the student of acting was the way she went on to
interpret - without perhaps ever excelling her role as Tess - everything from
Shakespeare, lbsen, Shaw, Synge, Wilde, O'Neill and Henry James to Somerset
Maughan, Robert Bolt, Royce Ryton and Alfred Uhry. Plain women or pretty,
queens or flower girls, princesses or imprisoned spinsters, dominant wives or
meek daughters.

Hiller had a particular feeling for supposedly unattractive women like
Catherine Sloper in The Heiress (New York, 1947; Haymarket, 1950), perhaps
because she knew she was no conventional beauty; taking over, in London, from
Peggy Ashcroft as Evelyn Daly, the daughter and maid-of-all-work in NC Hunter's
Waters Of The Moon (Haymarket, 1951); or in the same play at Chichester 27
years later as the supremely fussy Mrs Whyte, of the expressive knitting
needles; or as the deferential Miss Tina in Michael Redgrave's version of The
Aspern Papers (New York, 1962); or, 22 years later in the same play at
Chichester, as the fierce and ancient Miss Bordereau.

Perhaps two of the most conspicuous surprises of her career came with her icy
hauteur as a majestic Queen Mary in Royce Ryton's version of the abdication
crisis, Crown Matrimonial (Haymarket, 1972); and 16 years after that as an
august, irascible American widow learning to live with her black chauffeur in
Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer prize-winning play, Driving Miss Daisy (Apollo, 1988).

If Hiller never reached the heights as a Shakespearean actor, it was perhaps
that the voice seemed too hard and the diction disjointed, though for the Old
Vic (1955-56) she had plenty of passion for Portia in Julius Caesar. Watching
her deeply moving Hermione in The Winter's Tale, purists might complain of the
poetry being cracked; but then the character itself was on the point of
breakdown because the force of her anguish - dignity hanging on a thread - had
brought the woman to the verge of physical collapse.

As Emilia to John Neville and Richard Burton alternating the parts of Othello
and Iago, Hiller struck, as a critic put it, "fire from the tinder of the
woman's grief, rage and disillusion"; and as Helen in Tyrone Guthrie's modern-
dress Troilus and Cressida, the actor set the house on a roar as a vapid
Edwardian beauty playing a waltz at the piano.

If the ventures into lbsen were less remarkable - When We Dead Awaken
(Edinburgh Festival, 1968), Mrs Alving in Ghosts (Arts, Cambridge, 1972) and
Mrs Borkman for the National Theatre (1975-76) - you could count on the power
of her grief; though the irony of her comedy playing was something to savour,
perhaps because it was scarcer. Her deliberative delivery as Lady Bracknell in
The Importance Of Being Earnest (Watford, 1981) had us hanging on every word
without reference to Edith Evans.

Even opposite one of the most ruthlessly accomplished exponents of considered
speech, Robert Morley, as the Prince Regent, to her ill-fated, independent
Princess Charlotte in Norman Ginsbury's The First Gentleman (New, 1945) the
young actor held her own in a rivetting duel of personalities which to my mind
she won on points - as if to illustrate the difference between acting for
effect and acting for truth.

Her best films, after Pygmalion, were Shaw's Major Barbara (1941), I Know Where
I'm Going (1945), Separate Tables (1958, for which she won an Oscar as the
manager), Sons And Lovers (1960), A Man For All Seasons (1966) and Murder On
The Orient Express (1974). She seemed as true on screen as on the stage, and
there might have been more; but the stage stole her heart.

Wendy Hiller was appointed OBE in 1971 and created dame in 1975. Her husband
died in 1993, and she is survived by a son and a daughter.

· Wendy Hiller, actor, born August 15 1912; died May 14 2003

Posted by TDY at July 31, 2003 07:50 AM