Actresses and Transnational Celebrity in the Interwar Decades: Beatrice Lillie and Margaret Bannerman

Toronto-born Margaret Bannerman, the Canadian periodical Saturday Night told its readers in 1924, is enjoying an ‘extraordinary rise’ in London’s theatrical circles. Her ‘personality, ease, and an uncommon right way of speaking English’ had impressed the city’s theatre critics, who at first had perceived her as another (and somewhat lightweight) Mary Pickford but were now praising her work in Somerset Maugham’s satirical comedy, Our Betters. Simultaneously, Bannerman’s fellow Canadian Beatrice Lillie was lauded by critics on both sides of the Atlantic for her comedic work on West End stages. While Lillie and Bannerman started their adult professional theatrical careers in England, they also worked in the United States: Lillie debuted in New York in 1924, the beginning of many successful appearances, while Bannerman moved to the U.S. in the mid-1930s to pursue her film career. In 1928 she also toured Australia and New Zealand. Both women thus participated in an Anglophone culture of transnational celebrity which also encompassed Canada, as the press and the actresses themselves often reminded audiences of their Canadian background. In so doing they suggested that while Bannerman and Lillie were undoubtedly glamourous and sophisticated, their appeal also rested on their whiteness and, particularly in the context of Britain or the Dominions, representations of imperial womanhood. My paper will explore the layered and shifting forms of national, imperial, and transatlantic belonging these women performed, on- and offstage. It also will examine the interplay between coverage of their onstage work and depictions of their intimate lives, as the latter also played a crucial role in their celebrity status.