Former star of D’Oyly Carte dies

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33777, 25 February 1975, Page 15

Former star of D’Oyly Carte dies

Martyn Green, one of the most distinguished of Savoyard singers, has died in hospital in Hollywood, where he had been working for the last two years as an

actor. He was 75. Green was in the royal line of D’Oyly Carte singingactors that began with George Grossmith and progressed through Sir Henry Lytton to him. He was bom William Mar-tyn-Green in London on April 22, 1899, and studied singing with his father. Then he went to Gustav Garcia at the Royal College of Music from 1919 to 1921, the year he made his London debut

i at the Palladium in "Thirty Minutes of Melody.” He first appeared with the D'Oyly Carte Company in ; | the small part of Luiz in “The Gondoliers ” After a

thorough grounding in the G. and S. works in small parts and as an under-study, a customary apprenticeship lin those days, he took over I the leading roles from Lytton in 1934 and continued successfully to fill 1 them until 1951. In 1938 he appeared in a film version of "The Mikado." After retiring from the D’Oyly Carte Company he took up a new career as a straight actor in the United States. In 1959 he lost a leg after a lift accident. With great resolution he began to remake his career, using an artificial limb. About that time he commented that it was a bit like a baby learning to walk, falling down and picking himself up again.

He was a regular perlformer on the New York stage, and was last seen in a film of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh."