Lydia Bilbrook

Lydia Bilbrook (born Phillis Lydia Macbeth, 6 May 1888 – 4 January 1990), sometimes credited as "Bilbrooke", was an English actress whose career spanned four decades, first as a stage performer in the West End, and later in films. She is best known to today's audiences as "Lady Ada Epping" opposite comedian Leon Errol in the Mexican Spitfire movie comedies of the 1940s. She took her professional name from her home town of Bilbrook. She made her first stage appearance in 1906 and her last in 1924. She created roles in Where the Rainbow Ends (1911), The Great Adventure (1913), and Dear Brutus (1917). She played the role of Alice Hobson in the first London production of Hobson’s Choice (1916). She retired from the stage after her second marriage, in 1924, but appeared in several films between 1940 and 1949, most of them made during her residence in the US during the Second World War and early postwar years. Life and career Early years Bilbrook was born Phillis Lydia Macbeth, in Billbrook, Somerset, daughter of the painter Robert Walker Macbeth and his wife Lydia Esther, née Bates. She was a student at Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Academy of Dramatic Art (later the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). In October 1906 she appeared with Tree on tour in Kinsey Peile's adaption of Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Was.