In 1916, after training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and RADA, at the invitation of Lena Ashwell, she joined a concert party entertaining troops in France and, at the end of World War I, Germany.
[2] In 1927 she joined Lilian Baylis' Old Vic company; for her first season she played in Ibsen, Shakespeare (as Viola in Twelfth Night, Lady Macbeth opposite John Laurie, Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Gertrude in Hamlet) and Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop.
In 1931 she joined the Greyhound Theatre, Croydon, as artistic director, a position she held for two years before returning to the West End in a company headed by Tyrone Guthrie, with a long run in Dorothy Massingham's The Lake.
[3] Regular London acting engagements, including some film work, continued until October 1936 when, at Baylis's invitation, she returned to the Old Vic to direct Michael Redgrave and Edith Evans in a celebrated production of As You Like It.
[1] Her last appearance was in 1962 as Madame de Rosemond in The RSC's The Art of Seduction, a version from John Barton of Les Liaisons dangereuses, at the Aldwych Theatre.