ObituaryMary Hayley Bell
Actor, playwright and devoted wife whose film hit was Whistle Down the WindAfter the writer and actor Mary Hayley Bell, who has died aged 94, was hit over the head by an attacker on her way to a friend's dinner party, she collapsed on the door-step and had to be carried unconscious into the house. When she revived, she begged her hosts: "Don't tell the police - it will spoil the evening."
The anecdote perhaps illuminates something of the dilemma facing a woman who said she wanted to write searing plays full of social realism but often disappeared into the cosy domestic role of Lady Mills, the lively and loyal wife of the actor Sir John Mills. As a prolific (if not so often performed) playwright, she did sometimes tackle the world of the underclasses, but she was rarely able to get under the skins of her characters sufficiently to carry all critics with her.
Her first performed play, Men in Shadow (1942), was a smash hit. The idea came from her husband. The couple had heard a broadcast about the French resistance, and Mills, knowing his wife had a drawerful of uncompleted plays, suggested it might be a rivetting subject. She agreed and, two weeks later, Mills took the play, entitled To Stall the Grey Rat, to their friend Bernard Miles to read. Miles offered to co-produce it with Mills. Noel Coward, with whom Mills was working on the film, In Which We Serve, also liked the play, but called the title "piss-poor" and suggested Men In Shadow.
When the censor showed the play to MI5, the security service refused to let it be performed, and interrogated Bell on why she had included details of certain resistance escape routes. She deleted them, and eventually MI5 withdrew its objections. The play, in which Mills took the lead, hit the right nerve in the darkest days of the war. It had a standing ovation on the first night, a warm bath of critical praise and long runs in the West End and the provinces. It was also performed in New York and Moscow.
Its successor, Duet for Two Hands (1945), about a surgeon who unwittingly grafts a murderer's hands on to a patient (also with Mills in the lead role) was an even greater success - it was reported that even the Mills' friends, the Oliviers, could not get tickets.
Bell's third play, Angel, was performed at the Strand in 1947, but then there was a pause - and a dozen unperformed plays - until The Uninvited Guest (1953), a strange piece of work which dealt with a disturbed figure, played by Mills in a red wig, who returns to the scene of his childhood. The play was trounced by the critics; one called Mills "a bewildered carrot"; another attacked Bell for using the increasingly unfashionable "well-made-play" formula for a subject that required less neatness and more depth. Though a box office record-breaker on the pre-London tour (the Manchester Guardian was the one disssenting voice), the play was slated in in the West End and came off in less than a fortnight.
It was a sign of the times. Henceforth the tide of fashion was against Bell, and she turned to writing novels, the most notable being Whistle Down the Wind (1958). This story of three children who discover an escaped murderer in a barn and mistake him for Jesus became the popular film of the same name in 1961. Directed by Bryan Forbes and produced by Richard Attenborough, it gave Bell's daughter, Hayley Mills, her first big screen acting chance. Much later, in 1998, it became an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Another film, also very much a family affair, was Sky West and Crooked (1966), written by Bell, directed by Mills and also starring Hayley. But unlike Whistle Down the Wind, it was a box-office flop.
Bell also wrote a sprightly autobiography, What Shall We do Tomorrow? (1968), but she never again quite hit the right note as a playwright. This understandably frustrated her, though she was not the sort of person to let that ruin her morale or relationships.
Small, energetic and fair-haired, Bell was born into a life of tasteful opulence in Shanghai. Her father, a British army colonel, was commissioner for maritime customs in China, working to stamp out smuggling and piracy. She was educated by a governess, then sent to England to attend Malvern Girls' College and Rada. Her first stage role was as Henrietta, in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, performed in Shanghai by an American touring company in 1932. In London, she first appeared in a comedy, Vintage Wine, in 1934. This was followed by further Wests End roles, a tour of Australia and a New York debut in 1939. Her stage career ended on her marriage, in 1941, to Mills.
The couple had first met in Shanghai when Mills, on tour with the Quaints theatre group, visited Bell's family home. Partnering the teenage Bell at tennis, he managed to hit the ball only half a dozen times but still found himself on the winning side. Her vitality and his transparent decency were made for each other. Twelve years after this chance meeting (and others back in London), they were married, once divorce proceedings had freed Mills from an incompatible early marriage.
Their professional partnership - her as playwright, him as actor and director - was highly fashionable in the 1950s, when it was not unusual for husband-and-wife theatre teams to be in the same play. With the 1960s, however, such set-ups came to be perceived as cosy and complacent. "They don't want my plays now ... I never want to write another," Bell said in 1962. "A lot of hard work for nothing. I might just as well, straightaway stick some string through it and hang it in the loo."
Part of the trouble was that Bell's persona suggested that she knew little about basic domestic set-ups. She and her husband lived in The Wick, a fine house at the top of Richmond Hill, overlooking the Thames, in which she continued to write plays in a Gypsy caravan at the bottom of the garden. They entertained widely and were well known on the charities circuit, and for their loving relationship.
Fashionable or not, Bell enjoyed the love of relatives and friends as she battled on with an intelligent, if not overwhelming, talent, writing and sometimes performing on luxury liners to audiences more in tune with her than those in contemporary theatre. Latterly, perhaps with her tongue in her cheek, she sometimes sounded a little like Lady Bracknell, complaining, for instance, that she could not get a cook because the unemployed preferred the dole to £40 a week and a bedroom with a four-poster. There was certainly no doubt that she was a bracing, life-enhancing personality.
Sir John Mills died earlier this year (obituary, April 25). She is survived by her daughters, Juliet and Hayley, and her son, Jonathan.
· Mary Hayley Bell, playwright and actor, born January 22 1911; died December 1 2005
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