[1] She was born Lois Obee in Hornsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, and was educated at Aberdeen High School for Girls and RADA.

[5] In the film she plays Julia Trevelyan, a spinster living in a lonely cliff top house in Cornwall and haunted by the death of her sister 25 years earlier.

[6][7] Her best remembered role is as Mrs. Baines in the film version of Graham Greene's The Fallen Idol (1948), which starred Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan and Bobby Henrey.

[9] In the 1950s, as well as appearing increasingly on television, Dresdel moved more to the management side of things, becoming a theatre director under the aegis of the New White Rose Players, directing plays including the thriller Night of the Shoot.

The critic Philip Hope-Wallace, said Dresdel was "an actress of high definition with a real power to take an audience by the wrist and give them the works.