Lennox Milne

Lennox Milne, born Lennox McLaren on 9 May 1909 in Edinburgh, Scotland, was a Scottish actress and theatre producer who performed on Broadway in 1968. She was awarded an OBE in the 1956 Birthday Honours and died on 23 June 1980. Her professional name, Lennox Milne, distinguished her stage career from her private identity as the wife of Scottish writer and broadcaster Moray McLaren, with whom she collaborated on numerous radio plays until his death in 1971.

Milne received her theatrical training at the Edinburgh College of Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Following her studies, she worked for the BBC on school broadcasts before joining the Perth Theatre Company, the Wilson Barrett Company, and Glasgow's Citizens Theatre Company. Her early radio work included the central role of Chris Guthrie in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song and its sequel Cloud Howe, and she starred in One Traveller Returns, a radio play written by Moray McLaren, her future husband. She made her television debut in a 1951 adaptation of The Daughters of the Late Colonel, and later appeared in Sunset Song, This Man Craig, Dr. Finlay's Casebook, Scotch on the Rocks, and Quatermass.

In 1953, Milne co-founded the Edinburgh Gateway Company alongside Tom Fleming and Robert Kemp, directing and performing in many of its productions. That same year she made her first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe, performing in The Heart Is Highland, a one-woman play written for her by Kemp in which she portrayed all fourteen characters. The performance earned her the inaugural Scottish Arts Council Drama Award in 1954, and she later brought the production to Canada's Stratford Festival in 1959. It was her central role in founding and leading the Gateway Company that resulted in her OBE. Milne accumulated fifteen appearances at the Edinburgh Festival over the course of her career, a record at the time of her death.

Milne collaborated frequently with playwright Robert McLellan, taking the title role in the 1950 staging of Mary Stewart and appearing in Jamie the Saxt, Young Auchinleck, and The Flouers o Edinburgh. She also appeared in all of Tyrone Guthrie's productions of The Three Estaites at the Edinburgh Festival, and played Mrs. Gascoyne in the 1967 premiere of D. H. Lawrence's The Daughter-in-Law.

Her Broadway career brought her to New York in 1968, when she took the role of the headmistress in the stage adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She subsequently reprised the role at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. In 1965, Milne became a member of the Scottish Arts Council. She spent her final years in Haddington, where she was involved with the Lamp of Lothian Collegiate Trust until her death in 1980.