Mary Merrall was born Elsie Lloyd on the 5th of January 1890 in Liverpool to father William Edward Lloyd and mother Emily Tidswell. Her stage career started in her teens, making her first stage appearance in 1907, as Queenie Merrall and for the rest of her life she remained a well-known and respected stage character actress adept at scatterbrain roles in costumers and melodrama. She married John Bouch Hissey in 1909 but it ended acrimoniously in 1914 amid a great deal of public and media interest, after Hissey brought a highly publicised divorce suit alleging infidelity on Mary's part, naming several men including famous music hall star Albert Whelan. Although she was based in London, she often appeared in other prestigious venues in the UK such as the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Theatre Royal, Glasgow. Her second marriage to noted Shakespearean actor Ion Swinley, was dissolved in 1927. Among her most famous stage roles were Lady Macbeth in a controversial but influential 1928 modern-dress production by Barry Jackson which opened in Birmingham before transferring to London's Royal Court Theatre and then Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' at the Strand Theatre in 1940. Her stage career also took her to the US where she appeared in 'Canaries Sometimes Sing' (1930) in New York and Chicago. She did not make a noteable move into films until the 1940s when she was given leading roles in the Irish-set drama 'Dr.O'Dowd' (1940) and the film adaptation of Walter Greenwood's 'Love on the Dole' the following year when she played Mrs Hardcastle alongside Deborah Kerr and Clifford Evans.
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| L-R Geoffrey Hibbert, George Carney, Mary Merrall & Deborah Carr |
The 1940s then brought a steady stream of good film parts including her best-remembered roles as Mrs. Foley in the 1945 classic 'Dead of Night' and Mrs. Nickleby in the 1947 screen version of 'Nicholas Nickleby'. Into the 1950s, which saw the death of her third husband Franklin Dyall, she also landed a string of diverse roles in films such as 'Encore' (1951), the prison drama, 'The Weak and the Wicked' in (1954), the comedy, 'The Belles of St.Trinian's' (1954), and the harrowing World War II drama, 'The Camp on Blood Island' (1958).
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| Season 1 of UFO - A Question of Priorities (1970) |
As film work began to dry up from the late 1950s, Mary then increasingly found work in television, appearing in several productions for the ITV dramas, 'Play of the Week' (1956-65) and 'ITV Playhouse' (1957-60), as well as guest appearances in popular series such as 'Sir Francis Drake' (1962), 'Dixon of Dock Green' (1960-63), 'The Saint' (1963), 'Beware of the Dog' (1964), 'The Avengers' (1966-69),'UFO' (1970) and 'His Lordship Entertains' (1972).
Mary Merrall died in Brighton on the 31st of August 1973, aged 83.
see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2023/05/a-history-of-liverpool-thespians_22.html
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