Constance Carpenter

Constance Emmeline Carpenter (19 April 1904 – 26 December 1992) was an English-born American film and musical theatre actress.

Biography Carpenter was born in Bath, Somerset, in 1904, the daughter of Harold Carpenter and his wife Mabel Anne, née Cottrell, music hall artists. Her first appearance on stage was with fellow-pupils of the Lila Field Academy, a stage school whose alumni included Noël Coward and Ninette de Valois.

Her debut as an adult performer was in the C. B. Cochran revue Fun of the Fayre in 1921. Throughout the 1930s she divided her time between English and American engagements.

During World War II, Carpenter entertained troops throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Her final Broadway appearance was in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee play The Incomparable Max (1971), based on stories by Max Beerbohm.

Carpenter film credits were limited to Just for a Song (1929), Two Worlds (1930), and Brown Sugar (1931).

Personal life Carpenter married and divorced Paul Ord Hamilton, J. H. S. Lucas-Scudamore and the actor Eric Berry; she was twice married to and twice divorced from the songwriter Captain James Kennedy.

She died of a stroke in Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, aged 88.

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