Obituary: Dorothy Bromiley, Mancunian actress who dropped out of drama school to star in a Hollywood comedy

Dorothy Bromiley also became an expert on the history of needlework

Telegraph Obituaries
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Dorothy Bromiley, who has died aged 93, was a Mancunian actress plucked from drama school to star in the Hollywood comedy The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953). She subsequently married the mercurial American director Joseph Losey and later became a leading authority on the history of domestic needlework.

Dorothy Ann Bromiley was born in Levenshulme, Manchester, on September 18, 1930. She won a scholarship to Levenshulme High School and later moved to London to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama, then based at the Royal Albert Hall.

The extraordinary start to her career would have made for a Hollywood storyline in itself. In 1952, aged 21, she auditioned along with some 900 other young actresses for the American screenwriter and director F Hugh Herbert, who was looking for three “typical” English girls for his next film. The young student from Manchester fitted the bill and Herbert invited her to sign a contract with Paramount Studios.

There was much US press interest in the arrival of Bromiley and her fellow British actresses, Audrey Dalton and Joan Elan. They made the cover of Life magazine in July 1952; inside, a photoshoot demonstrating the differences between English and American girls showed them drinking tea and dancing demurely.

In The Girls of Pleasure Island, ­Bromiley played a 16-year-old, the youngest of three girls living with their uptight English father (Leo Genn) — the only man they had ever seen — on a largely uninhabited ­Pacific island. Romantic chaos ensued when 1,500 marines turned up to establish an aircraft base. When the film was released in April 1953 the young stars visited 35 cities on a five-week publicity tour. Thereafter, however, Paramount, unable to find suitable roles for Bromiley, left her idle.

Since her dream had always been to have a stage career, she happily returned to England in 1954. Within a few months, however, she secured a role in the West End in Edmund Morris’s The Wooden Dish; it marked the British stage directing debut of Losey, who had been blackballed in Hollywood as a communist. She became his third wife in 1956. ​

Her youthful appearance saw her continue to be cast in juvenile roles. She was Wendy to Barbara Kelly’s Peter Pan in the 50th anniversary revival of JM Barrie’s play and played a rebellious sixth-former trying to save John Mills’s inspirational music teacher from the sack in the boisterous film It’s Great to Be Young (1956), written by Ted Willis.​

She also played leading roles in the tepid comedies A Touch of the Sun (1956) and Zoo Baby (1957). A juicy role she was offered in her husband’s melodrama The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) might have boosted her movie career, but she gave the part up when she became pregnant with their son, Joshua. Thereafter her only notable cinema role was a memorable cameo in Losey’s masterly chiller The Servant (1964), as a woman badgering Dirk Bogarde to vacate a telephone box. By then she and Losey had divorced. On television Bromiley appeared in Z-Cars, The Power Game and No Hiding Place. Having inherited a love of embroidery from her parents, in 1982 she found “my second calling” running a specialist needlework shop in Sherborne.

She went on to curate highly acclaimed needlework exhibitions and wrote a number of books which included The Point of the Needle (2001) and The Goodhart Samplers (2008). From 1963 her partner was the Irish actor and screenwriter Brian Phelan, although they never married.

She predeceased him by five days and is survived by their daughter, Kate, and her son.