Beatrice Lillie

Beatrice Gladys Lillie, known professionally as Beatrice Lillie and by title as Lady Peel, was born on 29 May 1894 in Toronto, Ontario, the younger daughter of John Lillie, a cigar seller originally from Lisburn, Ireland, and his wife Lucie Ann, eldest daughter of a Manchester draper named John Shaw. Lillie attended Loretto Academy in Toronto and St Agnes' College in Belleville, Ontario. Her early performing life began informally, with Lillie, her mother, and her elder sister Muriel appearing together in amateur concerts under the billing the Lillie Trio. Muriel, once an aspiring concert pianist, later played piano accompaniment at silent film houses.

Shortly before the First World War, their mother brought the girls to England. Lillie made her professional stage debut at the Chatham Music Hall in 1914 and her West End debut the same year in The Daring of Diane, a musical comedy composed by Heinrich Reinhardt, at the London Pavilion. That October she appeared in revue for the first time in André Charlot's Not Likely! at the Alhambra Theatre. Biographer Sheridan Morley noted that Charlot recognized in her not the serious singer she had intended to become but a comedian of considerable and zany qualities. A succession of Charlot revues followed through the war years, including 5064 Gerrard, Now's the Time, Samples, Some, Cheep!, and Tabs. Noël Coward, also among Charlot's protégés, later identified Cheep! in 1917 as the first occasion on which Lillie appeared in what he called her true colors as a comic genius. During the war she became a favorite of troops on leave, developing a reputation for spontaneity and improvised audience response. In 1918 and 1919 she appeared in Oh, Joy!, her first starring role in a book musical, with music by Jerome Kern and a libretto by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse.

On 5 January 1920, Lillie married Robert Peel, great-grandson of the Victorian prime minister Sir Robert Peel and heir to the 4th Baronet, at St Paul's Church in Drayton Bassett, Staffordshire. When Peel's father died in 1925, the baronetcy passed to her husband, making Lillie Lady Peel for the remainder of her life. The couple had one son, Robert, born in December 1920. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Lillie divided her time between the West End and Broadway, with her income from the theatre sustaining the household.

Lillie made her first New York stage appearance in January 1924 in Charlot's Revue of 1924 at the Times Square Theatre, a production drawn largely from Charlot's West End material, much of it by Coward, and featuring co-stars Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence, and Jessie Matthews. The production was a significant success and established Lillie on the New York stage. Her Broadway career spanned four decades, from 1924 to 1964, and encompassed productions including the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, Seven Lively Arts, Inside U.S.A., and An Evening With Beatrice Lillie. In 1926 she made her first cabaret appearance at Charlot's Rendezvous Club in New York, and the following year she made her film debut in MGM's Exit Smiling.

Her collaborations with Coward were a defining thread of her career. In 1928 she co-starred with him in his revue This Year of Grace on Broadway, and that same year made her music hall debut at the London Palladium in his sketch After Dinner Music. In 1931, appearing in The Third Little Show on Broadway, she gave the premiere performance of his song Mad Dogs and Englishmen. In January 1939 she starred in Set to Music, another Coward revue, in which she introduced his song I Went to a Marvellous Party. Cole Porter was among the other songwriters who composed with Lillie in mind. In 1932 she made a rare appearance in a straight play, taking the role of Sweetie the nurse in Shaw's Too True to Be Good at the Guild Theatre, alongside Claude Rains, Ernest Cossart, Leo G. Carroll, and Hugh Sinclair. Vincente Minnelli directed her in At Home Abroad on Broadway in 1935.

Within a month of the declaration of the Second World War, Lillie began touring to entertain troops, traveling to Scapa Flow in Scotland to perform for members of the Royal Navy. She subsequently joined an ENSA national tour in 1940 and continued entertaining military personnel in Britain, the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Middle East throughout the war years.

In 1953 Lillie received a Tony Award Special Award in recognition of her contributions to Broadway. Her final Broadway appearances came in High Spirits in 1964, directed by Coward, which also marked her last stage performances. Although she worked primarily as a live performer, her final film, Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967, earned her considerable praise. Lillie died on 20 January 1989.