Britisher Yvonne Mitchell was first and foremost a stage actress who began her career quite early as a teen. 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 film debut in a key role in La reine des cartes (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 Les hommes ne comprendront jamais (1954). Her slovenly, cuckolded wife in La Femme en robe de chambre (1957) won her the Berlin International Film Festival Award. Other important films included Escapade (1955), Opération Scotland Yard (1959), Les procès d'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.
