Viola Lyel

In a long stage career she appeared in the West End and on Broadway, for leading directors of the day, including Sir Barry Jackson, and Nigel Playfair.

She studied for the stage at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and was a student at the Old Vic where she made her first appearance in 1918, playing small parts and understudying.

[1] During the 1930s, her roles included Nancy Sibley in Milestones (1930), Clare Pembroke in Nine Till Six (New York, 1930), Edith in Bernard Shaw's Getting Married (1932), Enid Underwood in John Galsworthy's Strife (1933), Prudence in The Lady of the Camellias (1934), Gwen in The Late Christopher Bean (1934 and again in 1935), and Miss Bingley in an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which ran for nearly a year (1936).

Among Lyel's roles in the 1940s were Emily Creed in Ladies in Retirement (1941), Miss Preen in The Man Who Came to Dinner, which ran for two years from 1942; she returned to the part in 1944 on a tour for ENSA.

[1] At the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon she played the Queen in Hamlet, Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Lady Politick WouldBe in Volpone in 1944, followed the next year by Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Octavia in Antony and Cleopatra, Mrs Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, Queen Katharine in Henry VIII, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and Emilia in Othello .