Evelyn Laye

Evelyn Laye, born Elsie Evelyn Lay on 10 July 1900 in Bloomsbury, London, was an English actress and singer whose career spanned operettas, musicals, stage comedies, and film across more than seven decades. She died in London on 17 February 1996 at the age of 95.

Laye came from a theatrical family. Her father, Gilbert James Lay, performed under the stage name Gilbert Laye and also worked as a manager, running the Brighton Palace Pier for a period. Her mother performed under the name Evelyn Stuart and was known for playing principal boy in provincial pantomimes. Laye was educated in Folkestone and Brighton. Although she walked on stage at the age of three in a Folkestone production, she considered her professional career to have begun in August 1915, when she appeared at the Theatre Royal, Brighton in the melodrama Mr Wu, playing the role of Hilda Gregory on subsequent tour. Her first London appearance followed on 24 April 1916 at the East Ham Palace, in the revue Honi Soit.

Her early London career took her to the Gaiety Theatre, where she took over the role of Leonie Bramble in The Beauty Spot in 1918, then played Madeleine Manners in Going Up later that year. In 1920 she appeared in the principal female role of Bessie Brent in a revival of the 1894 show The Shop Girl, in which she led a 60-piece marching band of real guardsmen in a number added by Herman Darewski and Arthur Wimperis. By the early 1920s she had established herself as a leading West End star. In August 1922 she appeared at the London Pavilion in the opérette Phi-Phi alongside Stanley Lupino, Arthur Roberts, and Clifton Webb. She then moved to Daly's Theatre, where she starred in a revival of The Merry Widow in May 1923, with a cast including Carl Brisson, Derek Oldham, and George Graves. She remained at Daly's for Madame Pompadour, an adaptation of a Viennese operetta by Leo Fall that ran for 469 performances, followed by The Dollar Princess and the title role in Cleopatra, with music by Oscar Straus and words by Harry Graham. Her sustained success at Daly's made her the highest-paid star in the West End across any genre.

In January 1926 Laye made her first radio broadcasts for 2LO, the forerunner of the BBC. That April she married the actor Sonnie Hale, whose given name was John Robert Hale Monro. The marriage ended when Laye discovered that Hale was involved with the singer Jessie Matthews, his co-star in C. B. Cochran's revue This Year of Grace. In April 1928 Laye starred in the opening production of the Piccadilly Theatre, Blue Eyes, a musical with words by Guy Bolton and Graham John and music by Jerome Kern, which ran for a total of 276 performances at the Piccadilly and then at Daly's. She was subsequently offered the leading role of Sari Linden in Noël Coward's new musical Bitter Sweet, but declined because the production was to be mounted by Cochran. With Peggy Wood in the lead, Bitter Sweet opened in London on 12 July 1929 and ran until 9 May 1931. Recognizing her error in passing up the role, Laye ensured she was available for the Broadway production, which opened on 5 November 1929 and marked her New York debut. Coward, who directed the production, privately noted that Laye surpassed Wood in the role and praised her grace, charm, and assurance. The New York Times described her as possessing a voice sweet in quality and full in tone, with acting and singing skill equal to Coward's composition. After the Broadway run closed, Laye returned to London to perform the role for the final weeks of the West End engagement.

Through the 1930s Laye divided her time between Britain and the United States. In 1931 she traveled to Hollywood to make the film One Heavenly Night. Her London stage work during the decade included two long-running musicals, Helen in 1932 and Give Me a Ring in 1933, as well as the role of Princess Anna in Paganini in 1937, opposite Richard Tauber in the title role. Her British films of the period included Waltz Time, Princess Charming, and Evensong, all released in 1933 or 1934. In MGM's 1934 film The Night is Young she introduced Sigmund Romberg's song When I Grow Too Old to Dream. In 1934, following her divorce from Hale, she married the actor Frank Lawton; the marriage lasted until his death in 1969. In 1935 she returned to the United States for a revival of Bitter Sweet in Los Angeles and then San Francisco. She appeared on Broadway in Sweet Aloes in 1936, and in 1937 she played Natalie Rives in Between the Devil in New York, co-starring with Jack Buchanan. Her Broadway career thus encompassed three productions: Bitter Sweet, Sweet Aloes, and Between the Devil, spanning 1929 to 1937.

During the Second World War, Laye entertained naval personnel. In the postwar decades, as fashion shifted away from the romantic musicals that had defined her reputation, she worked extensively in non-musical theatre, appearing in classical productions such as The School for Scandal as well as new plays, frequently alongside Lawton. She also appeared in long-running comedies, including The Amorous Prawn in the 1950s and No Sex Please, We're British in the 1970s, and continued to take roles in both American and British musicals. Laye remained professionally active into her early nineties, appearing at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1991 in a concert of Coward's music.