Dame Sybil Thorndike

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Thorndike, Dame (Agnes) Sybil (1882–1976), English actress. She began her long and distinguished career under Ben Greet in 1904 in a wide variety of Shakespeare parts on tour in England and the USA, and in 1908 joined Miss Horniman's repertory company in Manchester, where in 1909 she married the actor and director Lewis Casson, with whom she was associated in much of her later work. During the next five years she divided her time between London—where she was seen, among other parts, as Emma Huxtable in Granville-Barker's The Madras House (1910) and Beatrice Farrar in Houghton's Hindle Wakes (1912)—and Manchester, where she gave an excellent performance in the title-role of St John Ervine's Jane Clegg (1913). She made her début in New York in Somerset Maugham's Smith (1910) opposite John Drew. She was at the London Old Vic under Lilian Baylis, 1914–18, playing not only most of Shakespeare's young heroines but also, owing to the absence of young actors on war service, various supporting male roles in Shakespeare. On leaving the Old Vic she was seen as Synge de Coûfontaine in Claudel's The Hostage and as Hecuba in Gilbert Murray's translation of Euripides' Trojan Women (both 1919), as well as in a number of short-lived modern plays, and from 1920 to 1922 was in Grand Guignol seasons at the Little Theatre with her husband and brother. One of her finest roles was St Joan (1924) in the first London production of Shaw's play; she portrayed another Shaw heroine, Barbara Undershaft, in a revival of Major Barbara in 1929. She appeared in Van Druten's The Distaff Side in 1933, repeating the role a year later in New York, where she also played Mrs Conway in Priestley's Time and the Conways in 1938. Later in the same year London audiences saw one of her most memorable performances, as the elderly schoolmistress Miss Moffat in Emlyn Williams's The Corn is Green. During the Second World War she toured with the Old Vic company for ENSA to mining towns and villages, playing Shaw's Candida, Lady Macbeth, and Euripides' Medea. She was at the New Theatre (now the Albery) with the Old Vic company as Aase in Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1944) and Jocasta in Sophocles' Oedipus the King (1945). In 1947 she and her husband were in one of Priestley's best plays, The Linden Tree, and in 1949 she began a long run in the comedy Treasure Hunt by M. J. Farrell and John Perry. She was in two long-running plays by N. C. Hunter, Waters of the Moon (1951) and A Day by the Sea (1953), and made three overseas tours before returning to London in a revival of T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion in 1956 and visiting New York in Graham Greene's The Potting Shed in 1957. She and Lewis Casson celebrated their golden wedding in 1959 by starring in Eighty in the Shade, specially written for them by Clemence Dane, and were together in Coward's Waiting in the Wings (1960) and as the Nurse and ‘Woffles’ in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the first Chichester Festival in 1962. After starring in a new comedy by William Douglas Home, The Reluctant Peer (1964), she made her last appearance on the London stage in 1966 in a revival of Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace with Casson and Athene Seyler.

Her brother (Arthur) Russell Thorndike (1885–1972) was an actor who also wrote the play Dr Syn (1925), in which he played the title-role. Their younger sister Eileen Thorndike (1891–1953) was also an accomplished actress.