Sonia Dresdel
Sonia Dresdel (5 May 1909 – 18 January 1976) was an English actress, whose career ran between the 1940s and 1970s.
Life
She was born Lois Obee in Hornsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, England and was educated at Aberdeen High School for Girls.
Her performance in the lead role of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in 1942 "was legendary. It was the performance on which her reputation was founded. James Agate was ecstatic..."[1] Her leading role in the 1947 film While I Live gained her a great deal of acclaim[citation needed]. In the film she plays Julia Trevelyan, a spinster living in a lonely cliff top house in Cornwall and haunted by the death of her sister 25 years earlier.
Her best remembered role[2] is as Mrs. Baines in the film version of Graham Greene's The Fallen Idol (1948), which starred Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan and Bobby Henrey. The film received Academy Awards nominations for Best Director (Sir Carol Reed) and Best Screenplay. She died of undisclosed causes, aged 66.
According to the critic Philip Hope-Wallace, Dresdel was "an actress of high definition with a real power to take an audience by the wrist and give them the works. She had terrific personality and was terribly underused and misused. She would have been the Lady MacBeth of all Lady Macbeths."[1]
Selected filmography
- The World Owes Me a Living (1945) as Eve Heatherley
- While I Live (1947) as Julia Trevelyan
- This Was a Woman (1948)
- The Fallen Idol (1948) as Mrs. Baines
- The Clouded Yellow (1951) as Jess Fenton
- The Third Visitor (1951)
- The Secret Tent (1956) as Miss Mitchum-Browne
- Now and Forever (1956)
- Death Over My Shoulder (1958)
- The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960)
- The Break (1963)
- George and the Dragon (TV, 1967–1968) as Priscilla
- Public Eye (1968) as Mrs. Briggs
- Dixon of Dock Green (1968) as Mrs. Dewar
- The Caesars (1968) as Livia
- The Man in the Iron Mask (1968) as Duchesse de Chevreuse
- Last of the Long-haired Boys (1968)
- Boy Meets Girl (1968) as Principessa di San Fernande
- ITV Saturday Night Theatre (1969) as Miss Despencer
- Wicked Women (1970) as Mrs. Boding
- Bachelor Father (1970–1971) as Mother
- Paul Temple (1971) as Agnes Armadyne
- Wives and Daughters (1971) as Lady Pont
- The Onedin Line (1972) as Lady Lazenby
- The Strauss Family (1972) as Lucari
- Lady Caroline Lamb (1972) as Lady Pont
- Lizzie Dripping (1973) as The Witch
- Owen, MD (1973) as Threnody Piper
- The Pallisers (1974) as the Marchioness of Auld Reekie
References
External links
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