Lydia Bilbrook

Lydia Bilbrook was an English actress whose career ran across four decades, beginning on the West End stage and continuing into American films. Born in Somerset in 1888, she trained at Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Academy of Dramatic Art and made her first London appearance in 1907, playing Countess Carina in A Royal Family. She created roles in Dear Brutus (1917) and The Great Adventure (1913), took the part of Alice Hobson in Hobson's Choice in its first London staging in 1916, and did early screen work in two silent films, Smith (1917) and A Place in the Sun (1916). She moved to the United States in 1939 and took character parts in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), five Mexican Spitfire comedies with Leon Errol, The Spider Woman (1943), Passport to Destiny (1944), The Brighton Strangler (1945) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). A British film, All Over the Town, followed in 1949. She died in 1990.