UPON the death of Dame Sybil Thorndike in June 1976, at the age of 93, the film director Herbert Wilcox remarked: “Someone once said of her, ‘If everyone loved Sybil the way she loves the world, what a lovely place the world would be’. There is no better tribute to her than that”.
His wife, Dame Anna Neagle, said she was very sad to learn of Dame Sybil’s passing. “She was my idol. She was an incredible woman and a very close friend.” Lord Olivier - Laurence Olivier - said Thorndike was “one of the rarest and most blessed of women of whom this country could ever boast”.
The Herald obituary described Thorndike as the grand old lady of British theatre.
She had been an infant pianist and a prodigy, but after suffering a broken wrist she was advised that a career as a concert pianist was no longer feasible. She turned to the stage instead.
She made her first appearance in 1904, in The Merry Wives of Windsor. During the Great War she joined the Old Vic; “and her reputation as a tragic actress with an unforgettable voice soon won her world acclaim”.
Read more: Herald Diary
In 1925 (right) she visited Glasgow’s Alhambra Theatre to play the lead role in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, a drama he had written with Thorndike in mind.
When we carried this photograph two years ago, Herald reader W. Raymond Shaw wrote to our letters page to say it reminded him of a visit she made during the war, with a production of King John.
“Paisley Theatre was the venue this time and I was there one Sunday afternoon with my scene-painting father when I witnessed the great Dame, together with her husband Sir Lewis Casson, viewing the stalls from the empty stage and declaiming in Old Vic tones, ‘Oh what a beautiful little theatre!’
“Little did she know that the locals referred to it as the Bug Hut and when the River Cart, on which it stood, was in spate, the artists’ dressing rooms were unusable due to flooding”.
In October 1950 this paper’s drama critic praised Thorndike for her “exquisite performance” in Treasure Hunt, a play about an impoverished Irish family being staged at the city’s Theatre Royal.
As Aunt Anna Rose, Thorndike “spends most of her time sitting in a sedan chair in the drawing-room and speaking on the telephone. She possesses rubies valuable enough to mend the family fortunes, but unluckily she cannot remember where she hid them”.
At one point during the show’s run in the city Thorndike was photographed by The Bulletin (far right) on a visit to the Scottish National Institute for War-Blinded, in Queen’s Crescent, where a blind cobbler showed her how he repaired shoes.
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