Biography
Born on 1 April 1893 in Sydney, Australia, as Esmeralda Cicely Courtneidge, the performer died in London on 26 April 1980. Her father, the actor, producer and writer Robert Courtneidge, was performing in the operetta Esmeralda at the moment of her arrival, which supplied her first name. Once the family returned to Britain she prepared for a theatrical career, making her debut at age ten as Fairy Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then appearing in her father’s 1909 staging of The Arcadians. Her earliest recordings appeared in 1911, featuring numbers drawn from the production (The) Mousme in which she was then appearing. In 1914 she married the musical-comedy performer Jack Hulbert; while he served in the First World War she toured the music halls, adopting the guise of a male impersonator and a somewhat risqué comedienne. After several joint stage appearances the pair achieved their initial major success together in the 1925 revue By The Way, whose score was supplied by Vivian Ellis; the show completed more than three hundred performances before moving to New York. Popularity in the West End was further secured by Lido Lady in 1926, which carried a Richard Rodgers–Lorenz Hart score, and by Clowns In Clover, which opened the following year and continued for two seasons. Hulbert had by this time begun writing and producing as well. The partnership paused briefly, during which Hulbert appeared alongside Sophie Tucker in the musical play Follow A Star while Courtneidge delivered one of her strongest performances in another Vivian Ellis revue, Folly To Be Wise. Throughout most of the thirties she focused on screen work, completing Ghost Train, Jack’s The Boy, Aunt Sally, Soldiers Of The King, Me And Marlborough and Take My Tip. She returned to the stage in Hide And Seek in 1937; the following year the couple reunited for Under Your Hat, again with music and lyrics by Vivian Ellis, one of their greatest triumphs, which ran beyond two years and received a film adaptation in 1940. During the Second World War they enjoyed lengthy engagements in Full Swing and in Something In The Air, their final joint musical on the London stage, while also completing extensive ENSA tours. Post-war Courtneidge took the lead in Her Excellency and appeared in Under The Counter both in London and New York, where the latter production met with strongly unfavourable notices. In 1951 she played Gay Davenport in Gay’s The Word, the satirical backstage musical by Ivor Novello and Alan Melville that many regard as her finest role; the piece contained several notable numbers, among them “Guards Are On Parade,” “It’s Bound To Be Right On The Night” and “Vitality,” the last of which came to define her long stage personality. The production ran 504 performances at the Saville Theatre and proved to be Novello’s final work—he died three weeks after the opening. Her last West End musical, High Spirits, arrived in 1964 as a song version of Noël Coward’s 1941 play Blithe Spirit, though its numbers proved less well suited to her than earlier signature pieces such as “The King’s Horses,” “Home,” “There’s Something About A Soldier,” “We’ll All Go Riding On A Rainbow” and “I Was Anything But Sentimental.” Through the sixties and seventies she continued touring in plays and revues, including the semi-autobiographical Once More With Music shared with Hulbert. Additional films followed, notably a widely praised supporting role in Bryan Forbes’s The L-Shaped Room (1963) and brief appearances in Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965), The Wrong Box (1966) and Not Now Darling (1972), the last released when she reached eighty. That same year she was created a Dame of the British Empire. Courtneidge reached a later audience in 1986 when “Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty” opened the Smiths’ album The Queen Is Dead. A 1995 fringe tribute entitled Vitality, written and performed by Helen Fraser, further recalled her career.