Benita Hume

Benita Hume was an English theatre and film actress born in London, England, on 14 October 1907, who died on 1 November 1967, in Kent, from bone cancer at the age of 60. Over the course of her career, she accumulated more than 40 film appearances spanning 1925 to 1955, and she brought her stage work to Broadway in 1930, appearing in the play Symphony in Two Flats.

Hume's stage career began in London, where her credits included London Life by Arnold Bennett in 1924 and Chance Acquaintance by John Van Druten in 1927, before she extended her theatrical work to New York.

In 1938, Hume married film actor Ronald Colman, with whom she had a daughter named Juliet. The couple worked together professionally on two versions of the situation comedy The Halls of Ivy — first as an NBC Radio programme running from 1950 to 1952, and subsequently as a CBS Television series from 1954 to 1955, in which Hume played Victoria Cromwell "Vicky" Hall. She and Colman also made occasional guest appearances together on The Jack Benny Show on radio, portraying Benny's next-door neighbors, a dynamic they reprised once on his television program. Colman died in 1958.

Following Colman's death, Hume married actor George Sanders in 1959, and the two remained together until her death. Sanders had been signed to play Sheridan Whiteside in the musical Sherry!, but he withdrew from the production when Hume was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her television work included an appearance on Four Star Playhouse in 1953, in which she played Mrs. Bosanquent.