Viola Keats

Viola Keats was a British actress who worked on the West End stage and in films from the 1930s to the 1970s, though she never became a national star. She grew up in Worthing, Sussex, and trained at RADA, where she received the Bancroft Gold Medal in 1933. That year she joined the Liverpool Playhouse repertory company for her professional debut, playing Sarah in Easy Virtue. She soon moved into cinema, appearing in many low budget crime pictures. In the 1940s she became a familiar voice in BBC radio drama, and during the 1950s she traveled to Australia for a series of plays, among them A Streetcar Named Desire and Down Came a Blackbird, as Blanche Dubois and Diana Hartland. Her later West End work included the mother in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1972), Mrs Culver in The Constant Wife (1975) and Lady Frinton in Aren't We All? (1967). Critics praised her stylish, quirky acting.