TV Star Played First for NZBS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 809, 28 January 1955, Page 20

TV Star Played First for NZBS

OSEMARY MILLER, 25-year-old newcomer to British show business, who’s been playing opposite Dick Bentley in his BBC And So To Bentley, started her theatrical career in Néw Zealand 15 years ago-as a boy! When she remembers her dramatic debut in Tagore’s The Postman, broadcast over New Zealand’s national radio network, Rosemary smiles. English friends who hear the story smile, too-for anyone more feminine than Rosemary would be hard to find. Yet 15 years ago she won that New Zealand role on the strength of having "a voice like a 10-year-old boy’s." "Moreover, I kept getting boys’ roles for the next ten years!" she says. "I played David in David Copperfield. I played schoolboys-more than one-in Goodbye, Mr, Chips .. . in fact, Ill never forget what a thrill it was when I landed my first part as a girl!" Even in those days she was so diminu-tive--5ft. 034in.-that her appearance in New Zealand broadcasting studios was the signal for technicians to drag up a box on which to stand her so that she could reach the microphone. That box became a symbol-a symbol of childhood which she was determined to cast aside. "As I grew, slowly but surely, the boxes became smaller and smaller," she says. "And that time when I arrived to play my first role as a girl, the technicians hadn’t forgotten me. They rushed forward with a box-but at last it was a very small box." Rosemary calls herself an Australasian for, after her schooldays in Auckland, she moved with her family to Sydney, where she attended University. Now she shares with two English girls in London one of the few genuine "cottages" of Kensington-a tiny two-storey building the width of one room, tucked away in a narrow side street. Her companions are Yvonne and Frances Nightingale, sisters-related to the celebrated (continued on next page)

Florence. Yvonne is a model; Frances a journalist. Rosemary Miller won her fole in the Dick Bentley show soon after reaching Britain last April. Bentley’s scriptwriters, Muir and Norden, were impressed by her work in the Gently, Bentley series in Australia in 1951. In the interim, she had concentrated on serious drama: had toured New South Wales in repertory for the Adult Education Movement; and, had played Eliza in Shaw’s Pygmalion at the Festival of Western Australia in Perth, Yet her life had had its incidents of unrehearsed humour-including the occasion when, in Sydney, she was appearing in a play called Dark of the Moon. "For the part, my hair had to be dyed a bright, carrotty, improbable red," she relates, "so red that every time I walked down the street I felt that people must be staring at it. However, although my hair was dyed, my rather stronglymarked eyebrows had for some reason been left their normal shade of dark brown. You can therefore imagine my reactions when, in a Sydney street one day, I overheard two women passers-by say: ‘Look at that girl wearing false black eyebrows!’ " Rosemary Miller-whose father is a leader writer on the staff of a Sydney newspaper-came to Britain mainly for a holiday. Now as she herself sums up the situation: "Trouble with Britain isthe longer you stay, the longer you want

to!

MARJORIE

PLUNKETT

(London)