Geraldine Sherman

Geraldine Sherman, born Geraldine Judith Schoenmann and later known as Dena Hammerstein, is a British actress, writer, and theatre producer. She appeared on Broadway in 1972 in Butley, directed by her future husband, theatre director James Hammerstein, whom she subsequently married. She became his third wife, and following his death assumed the role of president and CEO of James Hammerstein Productions Ltd. The couple had one son, Simon Hammerstein, born in 1977.

Sherman was born in Staines, Middlesex, to Jewish refugee parents who had fled Czechoslovakia to escape Nazi persecution. Her father, Kurt Wilhelm Schoenmann, was born in Teplice in 1915 and married Edith Peller before the family settled in Britain. Because his nationality was recorded as Austrian, he was interned in March 1940 and subsequently transported to Australia aboard the Dunera, where he was held at the Loveday and Tatura internment camps until 1942. At the time of Sherman's birth, her father was still imprisoned in Australia, and her mother, living in a bedsit in Ladbroke Grove, sent the infant to a Jewish orphanage in Shenfield, Essex. Sherman remained there until the age of eleven, when she was returned to live with her parents. The orphanage's matron served as her primary maternal figure during those years, and the transition back to her family proved difficult. A theatre outing during her time at the orphanage made a lasting impression on her and sparked her interest in performance. At seventeen, she left home to join a theatre group.

Sherman's connection to Broadway came through her role in Butley in 1972. Her earlier screen work includes an uncredited appearance as a girl outside a secondhand shop in the 1964 film A Hard Day's Night, and she appeared in publicity materials for King of the River in 1966 and Take a Girl Like You in 1970. She also co-wrote the play When It's Over with Eduardo Machado, which received a playreading at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut during the 1985–1986 season, a workshop production there in 1986–1987, and a run at the Finborough Theatre in London from October 23 to November 16, 1991. She received a writing credit on the 1995 film Thin Ice.

Sherman met James Hammerstein in New York in 1970, when a choreographer friend invited her to holiday there. Her philanthropic work has centered on children in medical and care settings. She volunteered in New York City hospitals for more than fifteen years and in 2003 received the United Hospital Fund's New Leadership Group Humanitarian Award. Drawing on her earlier experience performing for children with special needs at schools in the United Kingdom, she founded Only Make Believe, a nonprofit organization that creates and performs interactive theatre for children in hospitals and care facilities. The organization brings actors directly to children, using a dressing-up trunk and scripts by Sherman, with the children themselves participating as performers.