Bea Lillie, ‘World’s Funniest Woman,’ Dies at 94

Bea Lillie, who was billed as “the funniest woman in the world” during a long theatrical career in Britain and the United States, died today at her home in Henley-on-Thames, her conservator said. She was 94.

“She just went this morning, peacefully, at 8:47 a.m.,” said John Phillip Huck, who was associated with the actress for 40 years and was named her conservator in 1977.

Lillie was a master of elegant double-entendres and sharp ripostes delivered with a flourish of an enormously long cigarette-holder. She was, in the title of her 1973 autobiography, “Every Other Inch a Lady.”

Beatrice Gladys Lillie was born May 29, 1894, in Toronto.

She first appeared on a British stage in 1914 and made her American debut in 1924 in a revue produced by Andre Charlot, and for two years she alternated between London and New York in his revues, which also starred Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence.

In 1928, she appeared in New York in Coward’s “This Year of Grace,” which had a long run.

In 1932, Lillie took a dramatic role as the nurse in the New York premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s “Too True to Be Good,” but then returned to working in revues. Those included “At Home Abroad” in 1935, “The Show Is On” in 1936 and Coward’s “Set to Music” in 1939.

In 1939, she also appeared in London in “All Clear.”

During the war she was a tireless entertainer of troops with sketches and Coward’s one-act play, “Tonight at 8:30.”

She had married Sir Robert Peel, a descendant of the 19th-Century prime minister, in 1920. Peel died in 1934 and their only child, also named Robert, was killed during military service in 1942.

She returned to the New York stage in 1944 with “Seven Lively Arts” and was in “Inside U.S.A.” in 1948.

From 1952 to 1956, she toured the world in a one-woman act, “An Evening with Beatrice Lillie,” which won a Tony Award in 1953.

In 1958 she starred in London in “Auntie Mame,” and made her last stage appearance in New York in 1964-65 in “High Spirits,” a musical version of Coward’s “Blithe Spirits.”

Her film credits included “Exit Smiling” in 1927, “Around the World in Eighty Days” in 1956 and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 1967.