Esmé Wynne-Tyson

Esmé Wynne-Tyson (29 June 1898 – 17 January 1972) was an English actress, writer and philosopher. As a child she acted in West End plays, and became a close friend, confidante, and collaborator of Noël Coward. She left the stage in 1920 and wrote a series of novels. A growing interest in religious and moral matters led her into non-fiction and journalism, sometimes in partnership with the writer J. D. Beresford.

Biography

Early years Dorothy Estelle Esmé Innes Ripper was born in Stockwell, London, the only child of Harry Innes Ripper (1871–1956), a stockbroker, and Minnie Maude née Pitt (1874–1940). Educated first by governesses, then at an English boarding school and at a Belgian convent, she became a child-actress, taking the stage name Esmé Wynne in 1909.

She made her professional début in Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird and was the original Rosamund in Where the Rainbow Ends in 1911. With Coward, she wrote a series of short plays, under the joint pen-name "Esnomel": The Last Chapter (staged 1917), To Have and to Hold (not staged), and Women and Whisky (staged 1918). Her last stage appearance was as Faith in Coward's comedy I'll Leave It to You, in 1920, They combined their names as "Wynne-Tyson" the following year.

In the years after her marriage, Wynne-Tyson wrote a series of novels: Security, 1927; Quicksand, 1927; Momus, 1928; Melody, 1929; and Incense and Sweet Cane, 1930. All five of these novels were to some extent autobiographical, reflecting the deterioration of her marriage and her increasing attachment to religion. From 1961 to 1970 she edited the magazine World Forum, which focused on vegetarianism and humanitarian matters.

Inspiration for stage characters Wynne-Tyson was the inspiration for several stage characters. Some critics have seen elements of her in Madame Arcati, the eccentric spiritualist in Coward's Blithe Spirit, though the chief source of the character is thought to be another of Coward's friends, the writer Clemence Dane. However, Carlotta in Coward's late play A Song at Twilight was based on Wynne-Tyson after she had briefly come back into Coward's life in 1952, and Amanda's cries of "sollocks" in Private Lives to restore peace at times of quarrel have their origins in Wynne-Tyson's youthful rules of engagement with Coward. Her son Jon wrote a comedy, Marvellous Party, about a middle-age reunion of his mother and Coward.

Wynne-Tyson died in Chichester at the age of 73.