Adele Dixon

Adele Dixon, born Adelaide Helena Dixon on 3 June 1908 in London, was an English actress and singer whose career spanned the West End, Broadway, film, radio, and the earliest days of British television. The daughter of a coach maker, Frederick Dixon, and his wife Elizabeth, Dixon trained first at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts as a child, making her professional debut as the First Elf in Where the Rainbow Ends in December 1921. She subsequently won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she studied for two years under Kenneth Barnes. By her late teens she was already taking on leading adult roles, and in 1927 she toured Egypt with Robert Atkins's company, performing Olivia in Twelfth Night, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, Mariana in Measure for Measure, and Bianca in Othello.

In August 1928, Dixon married Ernest Schwaiger, a leading jeweller. The couple had no children, and remained together until his death in 1976. The month following her wedding, Dixon joined the Old Vic company for two seasons, from 1928 to 1930, taking on thirteen Shakespearean roles among others. These included Hecate in Macbeth, with John Laurie in the title role, and Olivia opposite John Gielgud's Hamlet. She also appeared in works by Sheridan, Molière, and Shaw. A pivotal moment came when she took the singing role of the Sleeping Beauty in Adam's Opera by Clemence Dane, with music by Richard Addinsell. Though the production was not especially well received, Addinsell was sufficiently impressed by Dixon's performance to secure her the leading female role of Susie in the West End adaptation of J. B. Priestley's The Good Companions in 1931, adapted by Priestley and Edward Knoblock with music by Addinsell. Gielgud played opposite her as Inigo, and the production ran for nearly a year across 1931 and 1932.

Dixon's Broadway career ran from 1931 to 1948. While her West End work during the 1930s encompassed a broad range of productions — including Ian Hay's farce Orders is Orders in 1932, Wild Violets in 1933, Guy Bolton's Give Me a Ring in 1933, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Three Sisters in 1934, and Cole Porter's Anything Goes in 1935, in which she starred as Hope Harcourt — she also made her mark on the New York stage. In September 1936, she appeared in the Stanley Lupino and Laddie Cliff West End musical comedy Over She Goes at the Saville Theatre, playing the romantic role of Pamela and introducing the foxtrot number "I Breathe on Windows," with music by Billy Mayerl and lyrics by Desmond Carter and Frank Eyton. The production ran for 246 performances, closing on 22 May 1937.

Dixon made her New York debut in December 1937, starring as Claudette in Between the Devil, a musical by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Her co-stars were Jack Buchanan and Evelyn Laye, but despite the strength of the cast the production ran for only 93 performances, from 22 December 1937 to 12 March 1938. Returning to London, she starred in The Fleet's Lit Up in 1938, with a book by Guy Bolton, Fred Thompson, and Bert Lee and music and lyrics by Vivian Ellis, which proved to be her last show before the Second World War.

A landmark moment in Dixon's career came on 2 November 1936, when she performed the specially commissioned song "Television" — also known as "Bringing Television to You" — live at the official launch of the BBC Television Service from Alexandra Palace, accompanied by the BBC Television Orchestra conducted by Hyam Greenbaum. She is noted as the first woman to perform on British television at the start of regular broadcasts, though dance band singer Helen McKay had appeared in high-definition test transmissions to Radiolympia in August of that same year. Television as a medium held little appeal for Dixon, who made clear her preference for radio.

Dixon made her first film in 1931, playing Consuelo Pratt in Uneasy Virtue. Her second film of the 1930s was Calling the Tune in 1936, in which she played Julia Harbord. During the war years she moved between straight dramatic roles and pantomime, appearing in London and the provinces. Her straight parts included Portia in The Merchant of Venice in 1942 and Irene in Eric Linklater's Crisis in Heaven in 1944, directed by Gielgud. She also appeared in the 1941 film of Ben Travers' Banana Ridge alongside Robertson Hare and Alfred Drayton. Her final film was the 1947 drama Woman to Woman, in which she played Sylvia Anson opposite Douglass Montgomery's David Anson.

Dixon returned to Broadway in 1948, again alongside Jack Buchanan, in Sacha Guitry's comedy Don't Listen, Ladies, which met with no greater success than Between the Devil had a decade earlier. The following year she took the title role in the West End musical Belinda Fair by Eric Maschwitz and Jack Strachey, which The Times described as a major personal hit. That production, which closed in 1949, marked her final stage appearance before retirement. Following the death of her husband in 1976, Dixon never fully recovered. She died of pneumonia in Manchester on 11 April 1992, at the age of 83.