Dilys Powell

Elizabeth Dilys Powell, CBE (20 July 1901 – 3 June 1995) was an English journalist who wrote for the The Sunday Times for over fifty years. Powell was best known as a film critic, noted for her receptiveness to cultural change in the cinema, and she coined many classic phrases about films and actors. She was also one of the founder members of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), which launched commercial TV in the UK.

Born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, to Thomas Powell, a bank manager, and Mary Jane Lloyd, Dilys Powell attended Talbot Heath School, Bournemouth before reading modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford.

At Oxford she met an archaeologist, Humfry Payne (19 February 1902 – 9 May 1936), whom she married in 1926.

After her graduation with a first-class honours degree, Powell spent a period as personal assistant to Lady Ottoline Morrell before joining the literary department of The Sunday Times in 1928.

In 1929 her husband Humfry Payne was appointed director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens. From 1931 to 1936, Powell spent part of each year in Greece, frequently attending excavations where her husband was working. Payne died in Athens in 1936 from a staphylococcus infection. They had no children.

She continued her periodic visits to Greece after 1936, until the Second World War intervened. In 1939 Powell was appointed film critic at The Sunday Times, and in 1941 she found war work with a Greek connection in the Political Warfare Executive, which oversaw Britain's propaganda in occupied Europe. In June 1943 she married Leonard Russell (1906–1974), the literary editor at The Sunday Times.

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