Wendy hiller wikipedia

Dame Wendy Hiller, who died on Wednesday aged 90, was an actress who was adored by Shaw and won an Oscar, but kept her distance from the mainstream of British theatre, in which she flourished for more than half a century.

She came from the north of England where her father was a Manchester cotton manufacturer and was sent to school in the south of England to eradicate a northern accent - not to assist her theatrical career (she had never thought of that until success was thrust upon her in a play called Love On The Dole), but because it was supposed that a regional accent would tell against her chances of marrying.

In fact she married a northern schoolmaster, Ronald Gow, who had written Love On The Dole, the play which brought her sudden fame. George Bernard Shaw set the seal on her reputation after seeing her in Gow's huge success.

He invited her in 1936 to act at the Malvern Festival in two of his plays, Pygmalion and Saint Joan. From then on she never looked back, although she did not follow the conventional path to success through the Old

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