Viola Roache

Viola Roache (October 3, 1885 – May 17, 1961) was a British-born actress who built a career spanning more than fifty years on stage, screen, and television. Born in Norfolk, England, to architect Frederick G. Roache and Ada T. Roache, she was sent at age eight to an Ursuline convent in Tildonk, Belgium, by her own account to address her temper. She returned to England at seventeen and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, pursuing a stage career despite her parents' disapproval. Her professional debut came in April 1908, when she approached a London manager and secured her first engagement.

Roache began her acting career as an ingénue, described at the time as having wavy reddish-blonde hair and dark hazel eyes. In 1912 she organized a repertory troupe and led a year-long tour of South Africa, with the company traveling by train, automobile, and camel through English-speaking regions of the continent and across the Dutch veldt. She toured Canada in 1913 alongside Seymour Hicks, and made her American debut in 1914 portraying Elsa in Panthea at the Booth Theatre. She subsequently spent four years with Henry Jewett's Repertory Company, followed by work in stock theater in Boston. She also performed in stock theater in Toronto in 1930 and in Chicago in 1931, and in the early 1930s directed and performed with Clare Tree Major's Children's Theatres across the United States. In the early 1940s she taught speech and diction to private students in New York.

Her Broadway career extended from 1915 to 1956 and encompassed a wide range of productions. Her earliest credits included Taking Chances and Hobson's Choice, both in 1915. Subsequent appearances included The Woman Disputed (1926), The Bachelor Father (1928), Sweet Stranger (1930), The Bellamy Trial (1931), The Merchant of Venice (1931), The Distaff Side (1934), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935), Pride and Prejudice (1935), Call It a Day (1936), Madame Bovary (1937), I Am My Youth (1938), The Man from Cairo (1938), The Two Bouquets (1938), Lorelei (1938), Wuthering Heights (1939), Theatre (1941), Bird in Hand (1942), Sweet Charity (1942), No Way Out (1944), Hand in Glove (1944), The Haven (1946), Craig's Wife (1947), Angel in the Wings (1947), Make Way for Lucia (1948), Cyrano de Bergerac (1953), Richard III (1953), and What Every Woman Knows (1954). A 1942 newspaper article described her as "one of the best-known character actresses on the American stage."

Roache's final and most prominent Broadway credit was My Fair Lady, which opened in 1956. She was a member of the original cast, portraying Mrs. Eynsford-Hill at the show's opening and later taking on the role of Mrs. Higgins, remaining with the production until late 1958. Her film work included Harriet Craig, an adaptation of Craig's Wife, a play in which she had also appeared on stage. Following that film, Columbia Pictures offered her a seven-year contract, which she declined. When studio negotiators cited the security the contract would provide, she responded that she had never had security in her career and would not know what to do with it.

Roache appeared regularly on television and noted that her visibility to the general public increased substantially after she began appearing in TV programs. Photographs and reviews related to her career and that of her former husband, actor Lionel Bevans, are held in the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library, with materials ranging in date from 1920 to 1962. Her marriage to Bevans ended in divorce; their daughter was actress Philippa Bevans. Roache became an American citizen in 1953. She died of a heart ailment on May 17, 1961, at her daughter's home in Los Angeles, at the age of seventy-five.