Adele Dixon

British actress and singer

Adele Dixon (born Adela Helena Dixon; 3 June 1908 – 11 April 1992) was an English actress and singer. She sang at the start of regular broadcasts of the BBC Television Service on 2 November 1936. After an early start as a child actress, and training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she became a member of the Old Vic, from 1928 to 1930, appearing in a wide range of roles, predominantly in Shakespeare's plays, but also those of Sheridan, Molière and Shaw. Her performance in her first singing role so impressed the composer Richard Addinsell, that he secured her the leading role in the West End adaptation of Priestley's The Good Companions in 1931. After she left the Old Vic in 1930, Dixon played occasionally in non musical plays, but, in general, her career was on the musical stage, starring in shows by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Vivian Ellis and others. Later, she became well known for her appearances in pantomime. Her last appearance, before she retired, was in the West End musical Belinda Fair in 1949.

Dixon was born in London, a Cockney, the daughter of a coach maker, Frederick Dixon, and his wife Elizabeth (née Barrett) Dixon. She studied at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts as a child, and was cast in her first professional part as the First Elf in Where the Rainbow Ends in December 1921. In her late teens, she was already playing leading adult parts, and, in 1927, she went on a tour to Egypt with Robert Atkins's company, playing Olivia in Twelfth Night, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, Mariana in Measure for Measure and Bianca in Othello. In 1931, Dixon made her first film, in the role of Consuelo Pratt in Uneasy Virtue. It was one of only two films she made in the 1930s, the other being Calling the Tune (1936), in which she played Julia Harbord.

During the rest of the 1930s Dixon starred in the West End, and occasionally on tour, in a wide range of roles. For the most part she played in musicals, but an exception was Ian Hay's farce Orders is Orders in 1932. More characteristic were her singing roles in musical shows such as Wild Violets (1933), Give me a Ring by Guy Bolton and others (1933) and Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Three Sisters (1934). In the last, the weak score and lyrics fatally damaged the show, despite the efforts of Stanley Holloway and other cast members; The Times observed, "Miss Adele Dixon unfailingly provides what the play chiefly lacks – swiftness, economy and glamour. In 1935, Dixon starred as Hope Harcourt in the London production of Cole Porter's Anything Goes. In 1937, Dixon made her New York debut as Claudette in the Between the Devil by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Returning to London, Dixon starred in The Fleet's Lit Up (1938), with a book by Guy Bolton, Fred Thompson and Bert Lee and music and lyrics by Vivian Ellis. This was her last show before the Second World War.

In 1941, Dixon appeared with Robertson Hare and Alfred Drayton in the film of Ben Travers' Banana Ridge; she did not return to musicals until 1944. In the intervening years, she played a range of roles. Her straight parts included Portia in The Merchant of Venice (1942), and Irene in Eric Linklater's Crisis in Heaven (1944) directed by GieIgud, but, in the main, she was a pantomime star in the war years, appearing in London and the provinces. Dixon's last film was the 1947 drama Woman to Woman as Sylvia Anson to Douglass Montgomery's David Anson. In 1948, she appeared on Broadway again, together with Jack Buchanan. This time they played in Sacha Guitry's comedy Don't Listen Ladies!, which was no more successful than Between the Devil had been. The following year, she scored what The Times described as a major personal hit in the title role of her last West End musical, Belinda Fair by Eric Maschwitz and Jack Strachey. Dixon retired after the run of Belinda Fair. She and her husband were a devoted couple, and his death in 1976 was a blow from which she never wholly recovered. She died of pneumonia at the age of 83 in Manchester, on 11 April 1992.