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The young Sybil Thorndike – a ‘red hot socialist’ |
Stellar Sybil, outspoken sage of stage
West End actor Sybil Thorndike became a dynamic campaigner respected by some of the past century’s most influential figures, writes Illtyd Harrington
Sybil Thorndike: A Star Of Life.
By Jonathan Croall. Haus Books
SYBIL Thorndike was a woman for all seasons. In 68 years she appeared in more than 300 plays and was constantly on the West End stage.
The granddaughter of a general in the Royal Artillery, she became Britain’s best-known pacifist. As a young girl she had talked with Mark Twain. In late middle age she helped calm Marilyn Monroe while filming with Laurence Olivier – he was a protégé of hers. At the beginning of the organised movement for the emancipation of women she was up front and remained there all her life – even the fearsome Emmeline Pankhurst deferred to her.
Paradoxically, Thorndike continued as a fervent supporter of the Communist party’s Daily Worker (Morning Star), even starting its new presses while remaining a high Anglican.
Her 60-year marriage to the actor-director Lewis Casson was artistically combative. She and Casson always recited a psalm before going on stage. Boldly and unbowed, she answered charges of being contradictory with: “I am a red-hot socialist” – not a phrase often heard in the post-Blair Labour party.
Incidentally, it was she, not Blair, who initiated the slogan “education, education, education”, speaking at a rally in the 1920s.
Born in 1882, a child of a Kent vicarage, she always embraced Christianity, and, after her death in 1976 her ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey. She became the first woman of her profession to be lodged there.
During her long life, actors, thinkers and politicians sought Thorndike’s company. Among them Hilbert Murray, professor of Greek at Oxford, known as the “Sage of the Age”, and Bertrand Russell, scholar, mathematician and philosopher.
She mastered Greek and did well with Welsh. On the piano, Thorndike was a highly respected interpreter of Bach.
Among the first to endorse John Osborne’s play Look Back In Anger, she disapproved of Joe Orton. To her it was sex in your face.
Yet she was a vocal opponent of all censorship. She loved travelling and performing with Casson, particularly in front of multi-racial audiences in apartheid South Africa. They were lauded in Australia and almost worshipped in India. New York always excited her.
Her exuberance earned the disapproval of the great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. In 1908, after seeing her, he told her to go home, have children, run a household and come back later.
It was to be a momentous meeting, which led to her place on the pantheon of outstanding world-class actors. On March 26 1924, the curtain went up on GBS’s greatest play, Saint Joan. The author and the actor delivered a masterpiece and even the hardest cynics agreed. Thorndike said the play took on heresy, loyalty and nationalism.
The combination of her moral strength and simplicity and that glorious voice of hers spoke the lines superbly.
Years later she expressed dismay and kind people said she “radiated” moral authority. She was in danger of being sanctified.
Casson and Thorndike bought a cottage in Wales where they walked strenuously up Mount Snowdon. The woman defied the ageing process.
Jonathan Croall has, I believe, written the definitive biography of this stupendous life force – a woman who never lost hope that a better society was possible.
Croall keeps a steady hand on the tiller, for Thorndike surged with demonic energy.
You will find in these pages a great humanitarian, whether it was opposing fascist generals like Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, or the murderous Pinochet in 1973 in Chile. This was asserted again in 1953 when her distinguished colleague John Gielgud was arrested in a public convenience. A time of sexual oppression did not prevent her leading him on stage the next night. A taboo was challenged and it had an effect on future liberalisation of the law.
No wonder that she was high on Hitler’s death list of 2,300 Britons after his planned invasion.
In 1963, Olivier launched the Chichester Festival and it was a splendid time with Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Thorndike played Marina, the peasant nurse. Although the cast was star-studded, the conviction she brought to the part won universal praise. I was there and I truly believed she was feeding actual chickens. No wonder AP Herbert dubbed her “a star of life”.
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