Yolande Donlan obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/05/yolande-donlan

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In what is deemed the most lacklustre period of British film history, the American actor Yolande Donlan, who has died aged 94, brought a welcome touch of Hollywood glamour. Donlan made her name in the UK, where she lived for most of her life. Though few would claim as masterpieces the eight films she made with the prolific British director Val Guest, whom she was to marry in 1954, they were reasonably entertaining low-budget movies which gave Donlan the chance to display her vivacity and versatility.

Born in New Jersey, the daughter of James Donlan, a bit-part player in many Hollywood movies, and Therese, a singer, she was brought up in American show business. She started to appear in Hollywood films in small parts under the name of Yolande Mallott at the age of 20, in 1940. Typical was her role as the French maid in the creaky horror movie The Devil Bat (1940), starring Bela Lugosi, in which she had almost nothing to do but stand around and say “Oui, Mamzelle” from time to time. In the same year, Donlan was one of the singing and dancing troupe of Earl Carroll’s Vanities, a musical revue on Broadway.

Soon after a six-month stint on Broadway in the comedy School for Brides (1944), Donlan was offered the role of Billie Dawn in a touring company production of Garson Kanin’s hit comedy Born Yesterday, which was playing on Broadway with Judy Holliday as the quintessential dumb blonde. At the same time, Laurence Olivier, anxious to add to his talents as a director and actor by becoming an impresario, wanted to bring Born Yesterday to London. Olivier flew to Boston to discover whether Donlan was as good as the local critics had said. She was. So in January 1947, Olivier’s production of Born Yesterday, starring Donlan, opened at the Garrick theatre in London’s West End.

As the intellectually challenged ex-showgirl mistress of a corrupt, loud-mouthed millionaire (“You’re just not couth, Harry”), Donlan, with a high-pitched Brooklyn accent and what Kenneth Tynan called her, “woebegone eyes, frail, pouting confusion, and piqued, upstage shuffle,” was a huge success. Unfortunately, her following two West End appearances, both in 1948, in a revival of Clifford Odets’s Rocket to the Moon and as Lucretia in Noel Langley’s ancient Roman musical romp Cage Me a Peacock, were short lived, though Donlan gained good reviews. More successful was To Dorothy a Son (1950), a marital farce where she blithely played Richard Attenborough’s disruptive American ex-wife.

In the meantime, Donlan and Guest had fallen in love, and set up house together. However, they had to wait five years for both their marriages to be dissolved, hers from the American actor Philip Truex, and his from Pat Watson, a Gaiety Girl. From the very beginning of their relationship, Guest set about writing and directing films as starring vehicles for Donlan.

Miss Pilgrim’s Progress (1949) was a whimsical culture-clash comedy in which Donlan played an American factory worker who saves an English village from an unscrupulous land developer. Mister Drake’s Duck (1951), a tame lampoon on the British Army, was about a farming couple (Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Donlan) who find they own a duck that lays radioactive eggs. In her first Technicolor movie, the mildly amusing Penny Princess (1952), Donlan plays a Macy’s shop girl who somehow inherits the fictional European microstate of Lampidorra, with Dirk Bogarde as her leading man. Guest switched to drama with They Can’t Hang Me (1955), a taut cold war spy thriller in which Donlan provided some sex appeal opposite Terence Morgan as a Special Branch inspector. In Expresso Bongo (1959), a satire on British show business, Donlan effuses warmth as a love-starved American vaudeville artiste who takes young singer Cliff Richard under her wing.

In Jigsaw (1962), a crime drama set in a seedy Brighton, Guest allowed Donlan to pull out all the histrionic stops for the first time. She also conveyed emotion as a smallpox carrier in the romantic melodrama 80,000 Suspects (1963). But she had little chance to employ this newfound gravitas because she went into retirement, only reappearing a couple of times on stage and on film.

She continued to enjoy her passion for travelling, which is evident in her travel book Sand in My Mink (1955 ). A few months before Guest died aged 94 in 2006, he was asked the secret of his longevity. He replied: “Marry someone like Yolande.”

She is survived by her son, Christopher Truex, and her granddaughter, Natalia.

• Yolande Donlan, actor, born 2 June 1920; died 30 December 2014