Sonia Dresdel - 15149

English stage and screen actress with a commanding presence. Dresdel first made headlines on stage, in the lead role in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at the Westminster Theatre in 1943. It was on this outstanding performance that her reputation was founded. Probably her best remembered role is as Mrs Baines, Ralph Richardson's hostile, near-manic wife in Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948). In a part right up there with Lady Macbeth and Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca for sheer cruelty, she was unforgettable. Her other film includes While I Live (1947, as a spinster living in a lonely cliff top house in Cornwall,haunted by the death of her sister 25 years earlier), the brilliant thriller The Clouded Yellow (1950), and her later film work included performances in The Trials of Oscar Wilde (as Lady Wilde, 1960) and Lady Caroline Lamb (1972). Desdel later turned down a number of job offers she felt were unworthy of her talents and switched her attention to theatre management and direction. This is a very fine programme (8.25" x 6.25") for a 1970 production of Noel Coward's Hay Fever at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, nicely signed on the cast page in black fountain pen ink by Sonia Dresdel, in the starring role of Judith Bliss. In very good condition. (Sonia Dresdel was a good friend of collector John Street and had acted on stage with John in his early career as a thespian.)