Mary Ellis

Mary Ellis, actress and singer: born New York 15 June 1897; four times married; died London 30 January 2003.

Even in the palmy days of Hollywood, no scriptwriter would have dared to invent the circumstances of Mary Ellis's first appearance before the public. This took place on 14 December 1918 on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, when she was 21, in the small but identifiable role of Suor Genovieffa in the world premiere of Puccini's Suor Angelica (part of his Trittico) alongside Geraldine Farrar. She was, in fact, almost certainly the last surviving singer to have created a role in a Puccini opera. Only a few weeks later, Ellis became only the second singer in the world of "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi as she went on as an understudy for the ailing Florence Easton, who had created the role of Lauretta.

Mary Ellis was born to well-to-do parents in New York in 1897; a visit to the opera when she was 10 so enchanted her that her one desire in life from then on was to be a singer. She achieved her ambition with quite astonishing ease. She studied with "Mrs Ashcroft" (an elderly Belgian contralto, Frida de Gebele) and Fernando Tanara, and an audition was arranged with the Met in the spring of 1918. She sang just one aria from Massenet's Manon and, to her amazement, was awarded a four-year contract.

Apart from gaining experience in a variety of small parts, she was also entrusted with one of the two leading roles in the world premiere of Albert Wolff's opera based on Maeterlinck's play L'Oiseau bleu (1919). She also sang the Tsarevitch to the Boris Godunov of the galvanic Chaliapin and appeared five times as Giannetta in L'Elisir d'amore with Enrico Caruso, whom she adored. In the last of the performances, she remembered his handing her his handkerchief and asking her to wipe the sweat from his face before going on for the final scene and, during their duet, she noticed a trickle of blood on the corner of his mouth. Less than nine months later he was dead.

A highly intelligent woman, Ellis had no time for sentimentality, particularly about herself. In her fourth season at the Met, she became dissatisfied with her career prospects. As a comparative newcomer, the opportunities were few and far between and sometimes weeks passed without her appearing on stage. The trouble was that, instead of finding her feet in leading roles in a small opera house in Europe, she was appearing in a theatre that made sure that it employed the greatest singers in the world, and she had the sense to realise that, although her voice was of lovely quality, she was not in their class.

She had caught the eye of the emperor of the Broadway straight theatre, David Belasco, who encouraged her to abandon her safe and secure $350-a-week engagement at the Met in order to join a weekly repertory company in Indianapolis for $10 a week in order to hone any talent she might have as an actress. This was an invaluable experience, and led to her rare ability to alternate between the musical and the straight theatre for the rest of her career. Belasco later cast her as Nerissa in a major production of The Merchant of Venice (Lyceum Theatre, New York, 1922).

In 1924, after two straight plays on Broadway, she starred in the world premiere of Rudolf Friml's Rose Marie (Imperial Theatre, 1924). Her pianissimo high B flat at the end of the "Indian Love Call" in the first act set the evening alight.

But, after a year's run, Ellis again abandoned the bright lights in order to play Leah in The Dybbuk at the Neighbourhood Playhouse. By this time she had become emotionally involved with the distinguished English actor Basil Sydney, who was enjoying great success in classical plays in America. She had already been married briefly and apparently inconsequentially twice, but she now set up a working partnership with him that later led to marriage and to what she always regarded as the six most fulfilling years of her professional life. They first played together in Laurence Irving's adaption of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, enjoyed a record-breaking run in a modern dress version of The Taming of the Shrew, and great success in an adaptation of Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

She made her début in England in 1930 with her husband and the young Robert Donat in a failure Knave and Queen at the Ambassadors, but they triumphed in the first London production of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (Lyric, 1931). James Agate thought her very nearly a great actress, and in her next play Double Harness with Owen Nares at the Haymarket, he confessed to being reduced to "a state of dithering adulation".

It was now eight years since she had sung in the theatre, and C.B. Cochran, the leading musical impresario in London presented her in Jerome Kern's Music in the Air (His Majesty's, 1933) to enormous acclaim. In a box one matinée, Ivor Novello already planning to revive the fortunes of the ailing Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was enchanted by the acting and singing and immediately chose her to be the leading lady in his first assault on the citadel, Glamorous Night.

Before that could be produced, she went to Hollywood, where she starred in two musical films for Paramount (All the King's Horses and Paris Love Song), but she was released from her three-picture deal to return to Drury Lane. Glamorous Night was entirely built round her brilliant vocal talent as Novello, her co-star, had not even a tiny thread of a voice. The warmth and security of her singing of the wonderful numbers he wrote for her. "Fold Your Wings", "When the Gipsy Played" and "Glamorous Night", carried the show to a great triumph and secured for Novello the tenure of Drury Lane until the outbreak of the Second World War.

She returned to Hollywood for her third film (Fatal Lady, 1936) and obtained a divorce from Basil Sydney. After making a film in England of Glamorous Night she returned to Drury Lane for the second musical play Novello wrote for her, The Dancing Years (1939). If anything, this had an even more memorable score and once again her singing of "My Dearest Dear", "I Can Give You the Starlight", "Wings of Sleep" and "Waltz of My Heart" stopped the show.

With the outbreak of war, all London theatres were forcibly closed and though Novello begged her to continue "their thrilling association" (his words), she decided that, above all else, she wanted to do a war job. So she chose to lose her theatrical identity for three and a half years, and become a small cog in welfare and occupational therapy work at emergency hospitals, appearing for Ensa and singing for the troops in her spare time.

It was Ivor Novello who eventually tempted her back to the theatre by writing her last musical play for her, Arc de Triomphe (Phoenix Theatre 1943). It concerned the career of a young girl from the French provinces, and her determination to become a singer. This was Novello's only attempt at full-scale operatic writing and was much admired at the time. The run was, however, cut short by the ferocity of the "buzz bomb" attacks on London.

Typically enough Ellis then returned without hesitation to the straight theatre and joined the Old Vic Company which, having lost its London base to the bombers was evacuated to the Liverpool Playhouse. It was her work here with the talented young director Peter Glenville that led later on to the biggest triumph of her career. Meanwhile, she busied herself with Ella Rentheim in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal and a rare Noël Coward, Point Valaine.

In 1945, just as the war was about to end, she reappeared in London at the Piccadilly Theatre as Mrs Fitzherbert in The Gay Pavillion. She next joined Anthony Hawtrey's Embassy Theatre for the 1946/47 season to play in Henry Arthur Jones's Mrs Dane's Defence, Ian Hay's Hattie Stowe and a revival of Point Valaine. Her commitment to the season cost her the opportunity to play Gertrude in the film of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. Had she been able to accept the offer, it would have led to her playing opposite Basil Sydney, as Claudius.

Her disappointment was alleviated by the offer of the lifetime. Terence Rattigan had written two one-act plays for John Gielgud, the second of which, Harlequinade, was a satire on pre-war Shakespearean touring companies. The first play was The Browning Version, almost certainly Rattigan's masterpiece. When Gielgud became unavailable, Glenville invited Eric Portman and Mary Ellis to create the roles of Andrew and Millie Crocker-Harris, a schoolmaster and his wife locked in a bitter love-hate relationship (Phoenix Theatre, 1948). The power and delicacy of their performances can never be forgotten by any of the audiences that saw the play, and have remained, quite simply, unequalled.

As Ellis wrote in her excellent, unghosted autobiography, Those Dancing Years (1982),

There is nothing so gratifying as being good in a good play. To be good in a bad one is frustrating, to be bad in a good one devastating – and an actor always knows, even if he pretends he does not.

For both her and Portman it was, artistically, the highpoint of their careers.

In 1952 she played Volumnia to the Coriolanus of Anthony Quayle for the nine-month Stratford season, and then appeared in her last musical, a disastrous adaptation by Noël Coward of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, called After the Ball (Globe, 1954). In this it was clear that Ellis's singing days were at an end – the whole show was indeed a very embarrassing affair. Though she had a success at the Arts Theatre in 1955 as Christine in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, she did not play in the theatre again until 1960 at the Phoenix in Look Homeward, Angel, spending most of the intervening years performing in television plays.

It became apparent that her career was slowing down. For no easily discernible reason, her acting was no longer fashionable, and engagements became fewer and fewer. She had no reputation for being a bad or difficult colleague, but her undoubted lifelong shyness did occasionally lead her to exhibit a brusqueness of manner that no doubt was misunderstood. She made her last appearance on the stage as Mrs Warren in Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in 1970.

The charm she displayed in private life ensured that she was blessed with a very close circle of friends, most of whom she had the misfortune to outlive.

Richard Bebb