- Born
- Died
- Birth nameYvonne Frances Joseph
- Height5′ 4″ (1.63 m)
- Britisher Yvonne Mitchell was born on July 7, 1915, in London and was first and foremost a stage actress who, after being educated at St Paul's Girls School in London and The London Theatre Studio, began her theatrical career in the late 1930s. By the time of her death, she had performed under the theatre lights for over four decades. Her output in films and TV paled in comparison, but the work she put out in those mediums were of unusually high quality with mature themes.
The dark-haired actress made her starring film debut in The Queen of Spades (1949) and proceeded to become a moving, thoughtful, often anguished presence throughout the 1950s, winning the British Film Award for her touching, sterling performance as the biological mother of a foster child in The Divided Heart (1954). Her slovenly, cuckolded wife in Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) won her the Berlin International Film Festival Award.
Other important films included Escapade (1955), Sapphire (1959), The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Johnny Nobody (1961).
On the sly, Yvonne was a novelist of both children and adult books and an award-winning playwright. She also penned an enormously successful biography entitled "Colette--A Taste for Life" based on the famed French writer. The wife of film and stage critic Derek Monsey, she wrote her biography in 1957.
She died of cancer on March 24, 1979, in London.
- IMDb mini biography by: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
- SpousesDerek Monsey(1978 - February 13, 1979) (his death)Derek Monsey(1952 - ?) (divorced, 1 child)
- Children
- Married author and critic Derek Monsey in 1952, the couple would later divorce, only to be reconciled. They would remarry in late 1978, just months before Monsey died of a heart attack on 13 February 1979, with Mitchell dying of cancer just over a month later.
- Daughter Cordelia Monsey, born in 1956, was named after the part Yvonne played to Michael Redgrave's King Lear at Stratford. Cordelia has gone on to become a successful stage director.
- Changed her name legally in 1946 from Yvonne Frances Joseph to Yvonne Mitchell (Mitchell was her mother's maiden name). She also deducted a decade from her age, which is why many sources have listed 1925 as her birth year.
- The first thing she wrote was the play "The Same Sky" which was first produced at Nottingham Playhouse and which she thought was the best of all it's versions. Upto 1978 it was the only play she wrote although she did translate two French plays - "A Measure of Cruelty" in which Wendy Hiller starred in Birmingham in 1965, and "Beware of the Dog" in which John Neville starred in Nottingham and London in 1977.
- Lived for many years in the south of France, before returning to England.
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