LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Evelyn Laye
built 641 days ago
From All Movie Guide: Imported to Hollywood by producer Samuel Goldwyn in 1930, British operetta star Evelyn Laye immediately laid an egg. It wasn't her fault, though; she was extremely pretty and competently sang "Along the Road of Dreams" but One Heavenly Night's libretto was totally manufactured and leading man John Boles stiff as a board. As a consequence of the operetta failure, Goldwyn refused to ever cast Laye, Boles, Lilyan Tashman, and even comedian Leon Errol in any future ventures. On-stage from the age of 15, Laye became a major star in Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet, which she brought to Broadway in 1929. There would be several subsequent Hollywood films and she was back on Broadway in Sweet Aloes (1936) and Between the Devil but she was never as successful in America as in London's West End, where she continued to perform well into her late eighties. Laye was married to British comedian Sonnie Hale (who reportedly left her for musical comedy star Jessie Matthews) and actor Frank Lawton, who played the adult David in David O. Selznick's well-remembered version of David Copperfield (1935).
Source:
Evelyn Laye first appeared in a minor role at The Gaiety Theatre in The Beauty Spot (1917), but the following year she achieved stardom in Going Up!, one of the first aviation musicals. In 1920 she was Bessie Brent in a revival of the first Gaiety musical-comedy, The Shop Girl. A favourite on both sides of the Atlantic, when she made her Broadway debut in the first American production of Noël Coward's Bitter Sweet in 1929, a New York critic described her as 'the loveliest prima donna this side of heaven'. One of her last appearances was in Sondheim's A Little Night Music in 1979.
Source:
Evelyn Laye was never called the most beautiful woman in England until she was on Broadway, New York. Like many successful contemporary stage and cinema stars, she was born of actor parents. Her parents were touring in Charley's Aunt when she made her first appearances at the age of two. As manager of the Palace Theatre in Brighton, her father wrote popular songs that never became popular and got his eleven-year-old daughter to try them out. Later Evelyn Laye toured England in musical shows. Last summer she divorced Sonny Hale, actor.
Source:
For Elsie Evelyn Monro was better known as Evelyn 'Boo' Laye, the reigning blonde beauty of the London and Broadway stage. Her husband, John Robert Hale Monro, was the popular actor and comedian, Sonnie Hale. And Jessie Margaret Lytton, the other woman, was the West End's saucer-eyed, long-legged, highkicking musical comedy sex symbol, Jessie Matthews.
Source:
In Evensong, Laye plays Maggie, a young Irish girl blessed with a golden voice. She escapes from her repressive home with pianist George (Emlyn Williams). They get to Paris where he is unable to find work but her voice is discovered by Kober (Fritz Kortner). George is jealous and turns up at her big audition with a gun but is unable to kill that voice. He disappears and she gets a new name: Irela (after her native Ireland). As the years pass she becomes a big hit.
Source:
Evelyn Laye in one of the spectacular gowns she wore in the London production of The New Moon (1929), personifying the glamour of 1920s operetta at its grandest. She was a major musical stage star on both sides of the Atlantic, and even starred in a few screen musicals.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Evelyn Laye