Mary Hayley Bell

Mary Hayley Bell (born January 22, 1911 in Shanghai , † December 1, 2005 in Denham , Buckinghamshire ) was a British actress and playwright .

Life

Mary Hayley Bell's father worked as a British government commissioner in China , and the family later moved to Tianjin . It was there that Bell and the actor John Mills met for the first time in the 1930s . They met again in 1939 when Mary Bell played a horse in the comedy theater in Tony Draws . On January 16, 1941 , Mills and Bell were married. The church wedding did not take place until January 16, 2001 , her sixtieth wedding anniversary.

Bell ended her career with her wedding because she found it too complicated to have two actors in the family. All three children are also in show business: the daughters Juliet Mills (* 1941) and Hayley Mills (* 1946) are actresses, son Jonathan Mills (* 1949) is a writer and film producer.

Bell's career began in 1928 with the comedy Volpone . The film Vintage Wine followed in 1935 . In 1955 she appeared again in The Shrike in the same role, in 1958 she brought it back to Broadway. However, these appearances remained exceptions. In The Big Freeze (1993) she was last seen as a retirement home resident without being mentioned in the credits.

Instead of acting, Bell wrote novels and dramas. She initially wrote four plays: Men in Shadow (1942), Angel (1947), Duet for Two Hands (1945) and The Uninvited Guest (1953) - her husband starred in all of them. This was followed by the novel Whistle Down the Wind (1961), her collaboration on Sky West and Crooked (1966) and, incidentally, collaboration on the dialogues of Scott of the Antarctic (1948). Andrew Lloyd Webber made a musical out of Whistle Down the Wind (Eng. When the wind blows. A modern fable ) , and there was also a film.

Since 1975 the couple lived in Denham (Buckinghamshire) on a country estate. The couple only moved into a bungalow in 2003 because they could no longer climb the stairs. Bell developed Alzheimer's disease and was last in a wheelchair. Mary Bell died as a widow on December 1, 2005, after her husband had died eight months earlier, on April 23, 2005, at the age of 97.

Web links

• Mary Hayley Bell in the Internet Movie Database (English)