Elaine Hill; Actress and Theater Director

Elaine Welton Hill, a sometime film and television actress who found her metier on the small stages of Southern California, had dreamed of playing Lettice Douffett, the histrionic tour guide who improvises luridly funny scenes in Peter Shaffer’s 1990 Tony-winning comedy “Lettice & Lovage.”

She liked the character’s gushy credo, “Enlarge, enlighten, enliven.”

Plenty of room for acting there. And act she did.

Once she landed the role last spring, nothing, least of all the serious side effects from radiation and chemotherapy, could keep her from delivering the zany, physically active Lettice at every performance.

Reviewing the play at Actors Co-op’s Crossley Terrace Theatre in Hollywood, a Times critic said that “the luminous Hill leaves no eccentricity unturned as the extravagant Lettice.”

Hill died Nov. 15 in Los Angeles at the age of 45 after a three-year battle with ovarian cancer.

Born in Wewoka, Okla., Hill earned a fine arts degree from the University of Oklahoma and arrived in Hollywood in 1976 with a little money and a lot of determination.

“Don’t go into acting unless you absolutely have to,” she once warned a high school drama class. “Do it because it is all you ever want to do and nothing else matters.”

She landed the role of Mitzi in the 1980 film “The Competition” about piano rivalry, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving. Hill also appeared in a handful of television movies, including “Take My Daughters, Please” in 1988 and “A Matter of Justice” in 1993, and had guest roles on such series as “Murder, She Wrote,” “Picket Fences” and “A Matter of Justice.”

But following her advice to do what matters most, she gravitated to the stage.

Hill had small roles in larger plays, which she viewed as continuing education--”The Iceman Cometh” starring Jason Robards at the Doolittle in 1986 and “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” with Frank Langella and Lynn Redgrave at the Ahmanson in 1988.

Then she settled into working principally with Los Angeles’ Theatre East in Studio City, including a stint as president, and the Actors Co-op, as director and actor.

Her most critically acclaimed role was as what a Times critic called the superbly cast prima donna star in a 1996 production of Moss Hart’s durable comedy “Light Up the Sky.” Hill earned a nomination for the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for her performance.

But she virtually never saw a bad review. When she directed Ibsen’s difficult “A Doll’s House” at the Crossley in 1996, her work was called competent. When she appeared as a quilting daughter in “Quilters” at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Forum Theatre in 1995, The Times pronounced her first rate.

Reviewing her performance as the society grande dame who encourages protagonist John Merrick in “The Elephant Man” in 1995 at the Crossley, a Times critic wrote: “Hill balances Mrs. Kendal’s ripe earthiness with her studied grace.”

Hill directed and appeared in the original play “The Triumph of Maeve,” about early 20th century Irish poet and pacifist Eva Gore-Booth, at Theatre East in 1994. A critic said: “Eva’s relationship with [her feminist friend] Esther Roper is given a subtlety and believability through the insightful performance of director Hill as Roper.”

The actress is survived by her husband, Mark Ferber, production manager of the Hollywood Bowl; a sister, Christine Hill; and three nieces.

A memorial service is planned for Dec. 4 at 1 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, 1760 N. Gower St.

Memorial donations may be sent to the Gilda Radner Familial Ovarian Cancer Registry, the American Cancer Society for use in ovarian cancer research and prevention, or Actors Co-op.