Yvonne Mitchell

Changed her name legally in 1946 from Yvonne Frances Joseph to Yvonne Mitchell (Mitchell was her mother's maiden name). She also deducted a decade from her age, which is why many sources have listed 1925 as her birth year.

Britisher Yvonne Mitchell was first and foremost a stage actress who began her career quite early as a teen. By the time of her death, she had performed under the theatre lights for over four decades. Her output in films and TV paled in comparison, but the work she put out in those mediums were of unusually high quality with mature themes. The dark-haired actress made her film debut in a key role in The Queen of Spades (1949) and proceeded to become a moving, thoughtful, often anguished presence throughout the 1950s, winning the British Film Award for her touching, sterling performance as the biological mother of a foster child in The Divided Heart (1954).

Her play 'The Sane Sky' won the Festival of Britain prize of 'Best New Play'of 1950. She also won a Television National Award for her performance in 'Wuthering Heights'.

Other important films included Escapade (1955), Sapphire (1959), The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Johnny Nobody (1961). On the sly, Yvonne was a novelist of both children and adult books and an award-winning playwright. She also penned an enormously successful biography entitled "Colette--A Taste for Life" based on the famed French writer.

Daughter Cordelia Monsey, born in 1956, was named after the part Yvonne played to Michael Redgrave's King Lear at Stratford. Cordelia has gone on to become a successful stage director.

Her slovenly, cuckolded wife in Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) won her the Berlin International Film Festival Award.

The first thing she wrote was the play "The Same Sky" which was first produced at Nottingham Playhouse and which she thought was the best of all it's versions. Upto 1978 it was the only play she wrote although she did translate two French plays - "A Measure of Cruelty" in which Wendy Hiller starred in Birmingham in 1965, and "Beware of the Dog" in which John Neville starred in Nottingham and London in 1977.

Married author and critic Derek Monsey in 1952, the couple would later divorce, only to be reconciled. They would remarry in late 1978, just months before Monsey died of a heart attack on 13 February 1979, with Mitchell dying of cancer just over a month later.