Lydia Bilbrook (born Phillis Lydia Macbeth, 6 May 1888 – 4 January 1990), sometimes credited as "Bilbrooke", was an English actress whose career spanned four decades, first as a stage performer in the West End, and later in films. She is best known to today's audiences as "Lady Ada Epping" opposite comedian Leon Errol in the Mexican Spitfire movie comedies of the 1940s.
She took her professional name from her home town of Bilbrook. She made her first stage appearance in 1906 and her last in 1924. She created roles in Where the Rainbow Ends (1911), The Great Adventure (1913), and Dear Brutus (1917). She played the role of Alice Hobson in the first London production of Hobson’s Choice (1916). She retired from the stage after her second marriage, in 1924, but appeared in several films between 1940 and 1949, most of them made during her residence in the US during the Second World War and early postwar years.
She then joined George Alexander's company at the St James's Theatre, where in February 1909 she played the Countess of Rassendyl in The Prisoner of Zenda, and subsequently Princess Flavia in the same play. Also for Alexander's company she played Madge Rockingham in Colonel Smith.[1] In 1909 she married the actor Reginald Owen. They had one child, a daughter, Blossom (1911–1927).[2] The marriage was later dissolved.[1]
Between September 1900 and October 1910 Bilbrook was in five West End productions – as Helene in Madame X, Mrs Otto Rosenberg in Smith, Ethel Morley in The House of Temperley, Adele in A Bolt from the Blue, and Odette de Versannes in Inconstant George.[1] In September 1911 she appeared as Stephanie Julius in the comedy The Great Name with Charles Hawtrey (and, in a small role, the boy actor Noël Coward).[6] During the 1911–12 Christmas season she appeared as Mrs Carey at the Savoy Theatre in Hawtrey's production of a new "fairy play" for children, Where the Rainbow Ends, with a largely juvenile cast that included Coward, Philip Tonge and Esmé Wynne.[7]
At the Shaftesbury Theatre in April 1924, Bilbrook appeared in her final stage role, Mrs Cattestock, in A Perfect Fit, a comedy by Arthur Wimperis and Harry M. Vernon.[9] In October 1924, in Paris, she married a journalist, George Harrison Brown (1893–1977). She did not appear on stage after her second marriage. The couple had one child, Felicity, born in 1928.[2]
"BROWN Phillis Lydia HARRISON- of Bromham Hall Bromham Bedford died 4 January 1990… not exceeding £100000" in Wills and Administrations 1991 (England and Wales) (1992), p. 1135
Sources
Carson, Lionel (1912). The Stage Year Book 1912. London: The Stage. OCLC1001864194.
Goble, Alan (2000). The Complete Index to Literary Sources on Film. New Providence: Bowker-Saur. ISBN978-1-85739-229-6.
Parker, John; Freda Gaye; Ian Herbert (1978). Who Was Who in the Theatre. Detroit: Gale Research. OCLC310466458.
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