In her tiny Victorian cottage in Peckham, south London, Vi Marriott would offer select visitors a glass of pink champagne as she regaled them with memories of Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and John Gielgud, her idol.
“Larry was ravishingly handsome,” she would sigh, fiddling with a necklace of her favoured amber. Once he made a drunken lunge for her in a taxi. “Don’t be silly. Joan [Plowright] is waiting for you at home,” she told him.
Marriott had been hired as an administrator by the Old Vic in 1946. She was soon scribbling down production notes for Olivier and house-sitting at the Chelsea cottage he shared with Vivien Leigh. The king-sized bed swamped the petite Marriott, but she enjoyed washing in Leigh’s bathroom festooned with pink mirrors and white vases of lilies.
This was a small perk of a long career in theatre in which Marriott later became right-hand woman to Frank Dunlop, the first director of the Young Vic. Opening in 1970 in a former butcher’s shop in Southwark, the theatre was only intended to last five years, and its transformation into a permanent theatre was in large part due to Marriott’s constant labours.
Marriott, who for 20 years was secretary of the Young Vic’s board, tenderly nurtured the young actors and directors she called “my children”. Her own vocation had blossomed at 13, watching Gielgud in Richard of Bordeaux. In later life she would see him at parties, but never approached him. “Gielgud is God,” she declared. “You don’t talk to God.”
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Violet Olive Marriott, always known as Vi, was born in east London in 1920, to Dorothy (née Farley) and Sydney, the son of a star of the Whitechapel music hall. Sydney believed in respectability and suspected that Jane, his bohemian mother, had dispensed with the need to marry. Vi adored her whisky-drinking grandmother who told risqué tales of the music hall where the girls “were not exactly tarts, but for ten bob they’d oblige”.
Vi longed to act, but Sydney insisted that his well-spoken daughter should find “proper” work, so she trained as a typist and a bookkeeper, splurging her wages on West End plays.
She learnt to assemble a jet engine while working for Sir Frank Whittle at the air ministry in the Second World War. After being evacuated to Bristol she fell in love with a handsome airman known as Chick. On her 21st birthday Chick proposed with a ring made from flying wire, but when he was posted to the Transvaal the gaps between his letters to Marriott lengthened until a missive came instructing her to write no more — he had married another.
That was not quite the end of the story. When Chick returned to England the relationship was rekindled. They met on a train passing through Croydon after Marriott sent a message: “I’ll be in the last carriage. Tell him to get in.” A two-month affair followed, but Chick had a son in South Africa who he adored. “He burst into tears and said the boy should have been mine,” recalled Marriott. They agreed that he should return to South Africa. “My mother said he ruined my life, but I think he made my life,” Marriott later explained. “I’d have settled down and been a quiet suburban wife.”
Broken-hearted, she applied for any job going in the West End and was hired by the Old Vic. When the theatre’s trio of directors — Olivier, Ralph Richardson and John Burrell — were fired in 1948, Marriott remained, working for Hugh Hunt, the new director. In 1950 he invited her to Australia where he was establishing the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, the country’s first national theatre. He could not pay her, but Marriott’s mother, unbeknown to her father, gave their daughter her savings.
“She used raw energy and ripe vocabulary to obtain grants for young actors
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After five years in Sydney, Marriott returned home to nurse her sick father, smuggling her passport-less New Zealand lover into her ship’s cabin. She hid him for six weeks until they docked at Naples, stealing extra portions for him from the dining table. Loyal to a fault, she paid for his journey to England. He repaid her with frequent and flagrant infidelity until they eventually parted.
Devastated, Marriott found a job at a theatrical PR agency, through which she met Dunlop. While managing the Young Vic’s education community service she fought with raw energy and ripe vocabulary to obtain grants for young actors. Some evenings she went to Maggie Smith’s home in Chelsea, supposedly to answer her fan mail, but more time was spent sharing a bottle of wine than replying to Smith’s fans.
Marriott also helped the Cherub Company, which was founded by Andrew Visnevski and Simon Chandler. When the British Council sent the Cherubs to tour in the Middle East, Marriott became their company manager. Wrapped in the long scarves worn by the local mujahidin she calmly sipped tea and discussed Shakespeare on the Khyber Pass as bombs rained down across the Afghan border.
She was a modest, but talented writer and researcher. Ten Day-Amaze, her dramatisation of Jan Potocki’s Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript, won awards in 1997 at the Edinburgh Fringe. In 2006 she published The Fool’s Coat, a scholarly account of Father Bérenger Saunière, the 19th-century priest of Rennes-Le-Château, who allegedly discovered papers saying that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene. After careful sifting of the papers Marriott dismissed the theory as bunkum.
Mariott rarely travelled without one of her 300 teddy bears, each of which bore a name and an outfit. Going deaf, she preferred ballet to the theatre, but found modern dance akin to “watching paint dry”. She was fascinated by witchcraft. Her friends called her “the red-haired witch”. She belonged to a white coven, promising with a warm, infectious cackle: “I’ll stir the cauldron for you.” She died in the witching hour.
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Violet Marriott MBE, theatre administrator, was born on March 17, 1920. She died from pneumonia on December 17, 2017 aged 97