DIANA WYNYARD’S LIFE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 210, 18 August 1934, Page 14

DIANA WYNYARD’S LIFE

Repertory in England GRADUAL RISE TO FAME When an actor becomes enthusiastic over a woman who shares the spotlight with him, you can wager that that woman is decidedly interesting. And when the woman is Diana Wynyard that is doubly true, for when she is cast in a movie it is a foregone conclusion that a large share of the glory will be hers by inalienable right. Clive Brook has high regard for this woman who shared bis triumph in “Cavalcade,’’ and he was delighted when he learned that she was to co-star with him again in RKO Radio Pictures’ “Where Sinners Meet,’’ picturisation of A. A. Milne’s famous stage play, “The Dover Road.” Miss Wynyard is interesting not merely because of her beauty, her dark hair, her pink-and-white complexion and her statuesque figure, but because of her personality and the fact that she is a full-blooded child of Mime, Goddess of the Theatre. An English columnist once said that “.even the forces of evil put their shoulders to the wheel and helped her on the road to .fame,” a remark engendered, no doubt, because her first success on the stage was in “The Devil.” She was born in London on a bleak, foggy January day, the 16th, which may account for her delightful faculty of always looking ahead to the brighter things, and for the optimism which has enabled her to surmount all obstacles. In 1924, when she was just old enough to feel rather bare in short dresses and stilted in long ones, she organised a school dramatic club and directed and produced “Candida, • playin gthe title role herself. Long before she graduated she had her plan of life definitely charted. It called for proficiency in dramatic art, good diction, grace, and, in fact, for all kinds of success on the stage. She then and there determined that love and marriage should have no part in her existence until she had reached her professional goal.

Her rise was neither slow nor sensationally fast. In the first year after she graduated from school she played forty roles with the Hamilton Dean Repertory Company. Then she joined the Liverpool Repertory Company and remained with it for two years, appearing in scores of roles. In payment for her services, she received more experience than money. “Those three years were so pleasurable, so thrilling to me,” Miss Wynyard declares, “that the lack of money meant little to me. I would have cheerfully paid both companies for my job.” That the real Mime spirit. After her London success in “The Devil,” Miss Wynyard made her first trip to America and appeared in the American version of the same play, called “The Devil Passes.” By this time Fame was winging at her, and at the conclusion of the run she returned to London to az-ioar in “Petticoat Influence,” en-

acting the same role Helen Hayes played in America.

An American film contract followed, and so did a series of picture triumphs, including “Rasputin,” “Reunion in Vienna” and the memorable “Cavalcade.”