Mary Ellis, 102; Singer Turned to Acting in Musicals, Melodramas

Mary Ellis, an American-born actress and singer for whom Ivor Novello wrote his two hit musicals, “Glamorous Night” and “The Dancing Years,” has died. She was 102.

Ellis died Thursday at her home in London, said her former agent, Joyce Edwards. No cause of death was given.

Born in New York City, Ellis joined the Metropolitan Opera for four years at the end of World War I, but admitted that when young she had lacked the commitment and patience to develop that career.

She turned to acting, playing Nerissa in a production of “The Merchant of Venice” in New York in 1922. Two years later, she played the title role in the Broadway premiere of the musical “Rose Marie,” but left after an argument with the show’s managers and never sang in the United States again.

For the rest of the 1920s, she worked in theater, often with her lover, the English actor Basil Sydney, later her third husband.

They moved to England in 1930, and Ellis had her first London success the following year in Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude.”

Her next role was in a musical as the star of Jerome Kern’s “Music in the Air” at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1933, the show that prompted Novello to write “Glamorous Night” (1935) and “The Dancing Years” (1939) for her. She later appeared in another Novello musical, “Arc de Triomphe” (1943).

In 1937, she gave an acclaimed performance in “Point Valaine,” the melodrama by Noel Coward, playing a hotel owner who has a clandestine affair with a brutal native of a small West Indies island.

Critics say the high point of her career was as the embittered Millie Crocker-Harris in Terence Rattigan’s play “The Browning Version” in 1938, in which she played opposite Eric Portman.

She appeared in only one more musical, playing Mrs. Erlynne in “After the Ball,” Coward’s 1954 reworking of “Lady Windermere’s Fan” by Oscar Wilde.

Later performances in straight drama included parts by Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill; she played Christine Mannon in the 1955 revival of “Mourning Becomes Electra” and -- her last part in London’s West End -- Eliza Gent in “Look Homeward Angel” in 1962.

In 1993, at age 93, she appeared in a new TV series of Sherlock Holmes adventures.

Her autobiography, “Those Dancing Years,” was published in 1982.

Ellis was divorced three times, and her fourth husband died in a mountain climbing accident. She had no children.