“Hundreds of girls envy 21-year-old Dorothy Bromiley, the Levenshulme, Manchester ‘starlet’ who flies to Hollywood next week on a six-month, £150-a-week contract,” trumpeted the Manchester Evening News in early 1952, describing the young hopeful as “snub-nosed” and “doe-eyed”.
Bromiley, Audrey Dalton and Joan Elan were selected from around 700 applicants to play sisters living on a Pacific atoll that is besieged by love-starved US servicemen in the romantic comedy The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953).
The director, F Hugh Herbert, chose them as “the most typical types of British beauty”. Paramount ensured that the US press was flooded with so many stories about the newcomers that they were practically household names by the time the picture opened. A Paramount editor told Life magazine: “The Bromiley dame is a pixie.”
After this promotional blitz, the end product was something of a let-down. “The three girls were flown all the way to Hollywood to make the film,” reported the Daily Herald in its review. “I doubt if their journey was really necessary.”
Bromiley had settled in, renting an apartment in Beverly Hills and buying an MG. “I loved working at the studios and made quite a few friends there at the start,” she said, “but I soon discovered that when one’s not employed one’s friends in the film business soon dwindle.”
While Dalton was picked to star with Bob Hope and Joan Fontaine in Casanova’s Big Night (1954), the others fared less well. Bromiley screen-tested for a film with Ginger Rogers to no avail. In the absence of other options, she enrolled for a while at the University of Southern California, then came home. She was described in the press as “the Levenshulme girl who went to Hollywood – and didn’t like it.”
Not that she ruled out going back. “But next time, it will be on my own terms.”
Bromiley, who has died aged 93, later became better known for her marriage than for her evident charm and talent. She was the third wife of the American film-maker Joseph Losey, whom she met in 1954. Immediately after her return from the US, she took a job as a stage manager before being cast as a woman coping with her grandfather’s senility in Edmund Morris’s play The Wooden Dish, which Losey was directing.
She had shed her northern accent while in Hollywood; he felt her voice made her wrong for the role. Even so, according to Losey’s biographer Edith de Rham, “he had already taken a fancy to this malleable and attractive young woman.”
The relationship which developed between them had a practical advantage for the director: having fled to Europe in the wake of the anti-Communist witch-hunts in the US, his position in the UK was only secure until his passport expired. Marriage ameliorated that problem, though there was no suggestion that the romance was a mercenary one. “There were others who could have been more useful to him, so why pick me?” Bromiley reasoned. “There’s no doubt that I was in love with him, and I think he was in love with me too. I’m sure of it.”
The Wooden Dish was well-received though not well-attended; the cast lowered their fees to the Equity minimum for a week to ensure the play finished its run. Two years later, Losey and Bromiley married. As he presented her with a ring, he said: “For my child bride.” It was a tag that stuck, much to her chagrin. “Everyone called me the child bride, and I was very angry about it. Not that our marriage was a marriage of equals … He played the role of the father figure with me… I was 21 years younger, after all, and pretty naive about a lot of things.”
They lived together in some luxury in Knightsbridge with Losey’s son Gavrik from his first marriage, to Elizabeth Hawes. In 1957, they had a son of their own, Joshua. The marriage soon foundered. Louise Stewart, the director’s second wife, observed that Losey “treated Dorothy with such contempt … not so much as a daughter as a not very good servant”. Bromiley complained: “Joe was overpowering. He took you over, and your life.”
She had a minor role in his thriller The Criminal (1960), and was glimpsed briefly in his masterpiece The Servant, starring Dirk Bogarde as the live-in butler who gradually takes over the home of his employer, played by James Fox. Bromiley is the young woman who has a run-in with Bogarde as he exits a telephone box.
That film opened in 1963, the year that Losey agreed to Bromiley’s request for a divorce. She then became the partner of Brian Phelan, a friend of the couple, who had starred in The Criminal and The Servant, and who was also a screenwriter and playwright. Bromiley added his surname to her own; they had a daughter, Kate, and moved to Dorset.
Dorothy was born in Manchester to Ada (nee Thornton) and Frank, a sports reporter. She was educated at Chapel Street elementary school and Levenshulme high school, then the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Acting interested her from an early age. At 17, the Stockport Advertiser noted her “zest” in a local dramatic society production of Noël Coward’s I’ll Leave It to You.
She was already 22 when she passed for 16 in The Girls of Pleasure Island. Back in the UK, she played Wendy Darling, opposite Barbara Kelly as Peter, in a 50th anniversary touring production of Peter Pan. At 25, she was cast as a teenager in It’s Great to Be Young, a musical about a school orchestra, with John Mills as the students’ music teacher. She appeared in the Frankie Howerd vehicle A Touch of the Sun (also 1956) and another comedy, Small Hotel (1957), with Irene Handl. In 1958, she played Lucy Honeychurch in an ITV adaptation of A Room With a View.
After a smattering of TV roles in the 1960s and 70s, she retired from acting in 1977 following an appearance in the series Fathers and Families. Though she taught drama intermittently, and in 1972 had formed the Common Stock theatre company in west London, she later put her energies into a different discipline: in 1982, she co-founded the Sherborne Tapestry Centre in Dorset (it closed in the mid-90s) and explored her fascination with antique needlework. She wrote several books on the subject as well as curating exhibitions.
She is survived by Joshua and Kate; Brian died five days after her.
• Dorothy Bromiley Phelan, actor, born 18 September 1930; died 3 May 2024
