Mary Ellis (7) (1900–2003)

Mary Ellis was born May Belle Elsas in New York City. She trained as a lyric soprano and made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera in 1918. Among her many roles with the Met were Genovieffa in Suor Angelica and Giannetta in L'elisir d'amore. She began performing on the Broadway stage in 1921, and had success with both singing and non-singing roles. She created the title role in Rose-Marie in 1924 and played in The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew. In 1930, she emigrated to England with her third husband, Basil Sydney, and settled in London. There she starred in Jerome Kern's Music in the Air (1933) and then went on to her best-known singing roles as the heroine of three operettas by Ivor Novello: Glamorous Night (1935), The Dancing Years (1939) and Arc de Triomphe (1943). During World War II, she performed in hospitals and gave concerts for members of the armed forces. Returning to the stage after the war, she was a hit in Noël Coward's Point Valaine (1947), and in Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version (1948). One of her last roles was in the British television series Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in 1993 and 1994, playing Mary Maberley in "The Adventure of the Three Gables."
She published the first volume of her autobiography in 1982 under the title Those Dancing Years; another volume, Moments of Truth, followed in 1986.