Elsa Chauvel

Elsa Chauvel , born Elsie May Wilcox , (born February 10, 1898 in Collingwood , † August 22, 1983 in Toowoomba ) was an Australian actress.

Life

Chauvel came to South Africa when she was a child, where her father started a traveling acting company. She belonged to this under the stage name Elsie Silveni or Sylvaney , as did her brother, who appeared under the name Kyrle McAlister . She later joined other troops in Johannesburg and Cape Town with her brother before returning to Australia in 1924.

Here she appeared in Brisbane in the musical Crackers, where she was discovered by the director Charles Chauvel , who cast her for the film Greenhide and married in 1927. The following year she went to America with her husband and performed there in San Francisco and Los Angeles. After his unsuccessful attempts to gain a foothold in Hollywood, both returned to Australia.

Here she appeared on stage only occasionally, but worked in seven films by her husband as an actress, co-writer and producer, including In the Wake of the Bounty (1933) and Jedda (1955). During the Second World War, the couple made documentaries, 1956–57 the TV series Walkabout was created for the BBC .

After the death of her husband in 1959, Chauvel collected copies of his films for the National Film Archive. She was a vice president and patron of the Royal New South Wales Institution for Deaf & Blind Children and the UK's Barnardo's charity . In 1973 she published her autobiography My Life with Charles Chauvel .

swell

• Chauvel, Elsa (1898-1983) at Australian Dictionary of Biography
• Elsa Chauvel in the Internet Movie Database (English)