Athene Seyler

[2] She was also active in the South Place Ethical Society during the 1920s, where her father Clarence H. Seyler took his family for many years to hear Moncure Conway lecture as an alternative to attending a religious Sunday service.

[2] Clarence ran a class for the study of Herbert Spencer, contributed to the South Place magazine on rationalist matters and wrote a treatise on birth control which he circulated privately among his family.

[3] Her stage credits included Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest and a double-act, with her good friend Dame Sybil Thorndike, as the murderous spinster sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace.

Seyler virtually retired from acting after 1970 but continued making public appearances until well into the 1980s, and as a guest of Terry Wogan on his eponymous BBC chat show.

On 14 February 1914, she married James Bury Sterndale-Bennett (1889–1941), a grandson of the composer Sir William Sterndale Bennett, and they had a daughter, Jane Ann (1917–2015).

Athene Seyler died in 1990, aged 101, and her ashes were placed in the Hannen Columbarium in St Mary's Churchyard, Wargrave.

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Seyler and Nicholas Hannen in Winter Sunshine , 1937