Esme Church

Esme Church (10 February 1893 – 31 May 1972) was a British actress and theatre director. In a long career she acted with the Old Vic Company, the Royal Shakespeare Company and on Broadway. She directed plays for the Old Vic, became head of the Old Vic Theatre School and then director of the Bradford Civic Playhouse, with its associated Northern Theatre School.

In 1916, After training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and RADA, at the invitation of Lena Ashwell, she joined a concert party entertaining troops in France and, at the end of World War I, Germany. Among Church's earliest London appearances was a series of poetry recitals at the Æolian Hall in 1920. In the following year she was in The Child in Flanders by Cicely Hampton at the Lyric, Hammersmith, the first of several London seasons with the Lena Ashwell Players. In 1926 she progressed, with "high distinction", to the title role of a bored housewife in Jane Clegg by St. John Ervine at the Century Theatre. In 1927 She joined Lilian Baylis' Old Vic company; for her first season she played in Ibsen, Shakespeare (as Viola in Twelfth Night, Lady Macbeth opposite John Laurie, Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Gertrude in Hamlet) and Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop. In 1931 she joined the Greyhound Theatre, Croydon, as artistic director, a position she held for two years before returning to the West End in a company headed by Tyrone Guthrie, with a long run in Dorothy Massingham's The Lake. Later in 1933 she again performed Gertrude, in William Bridges-Adams's production of Hamlet at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, opposite Anew McMaster. Regular London acting engagements, including some film work, continued until October 1936 when, at Baylis's invitation, she returned to the Old Vic to direct Michael Redgrave and Edith Evans in a celebrated production of As You Like It. This was followed by Ghosts, an Old Vic production staged at the Vaudeville Theatre, which was presented for television later that year.

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