Submitted by
Roger Mellor
Belle Chrystall
Fresh-faced leading lady of the Thirties
The Independent; July 19th 2003
Belle Chrystall, actress: born Fleetwood, Lancashire 25 April 1910;
married 1946 Roy Proctor (died 1990; one daughter deceased); died 7
June 2003.
A dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, Belle Chrystall was a fresh-faced
leading lady from Lancashire who had a decade of film stardom in the
Thirties. She was also a prolific radio actress and for a time was
the face on advertisements for Lux toilet soap. On screen she made a
notable impression as the independent heroine of Hindle Wakes (1931),
a boot-maker's daughter in Hobson's Choice (1931) and the stoic
member of a Shetlands community in Michael Powell's Edge of the World
(1937).
Born in Fleetwood in 1910, she was educated at a convent in Preston,
Westbourne High School in Poulton and Cheltenham Ladies' College.
(Since her birth certificate was destroyed by fire, it has never been
ascertained whether Belle Chrystall was her real name.) She briefly
studied Law at King's College, London, before applying for a place at
the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) in 1917, to the initial
displeasure of her parents.
At the age of 18, she made her stage début in Crime (1928) and she
had her first screen role with a small part in the Michael Balcon
production A Warm Corner (1930), based on a Feydeau farce and
directed by Victor Saville. The first talkie for the comedian Leslie
Henson, the film also featured the future star Merle Oberon in a
small role. Chrystall became a star the following year when Balcon
and Saville, impressed by her work in A Warm Corner, cast her in
Hindle Wakes.
The third of four screen versions of Stanley Houghton's play (and
generally regarded as the best), it featured a sparkling performance
from Chrystall as the strong-minded mill girl who has an illicit
weekend with her father's employer but, after being found out,
refuses to marry him. She then played Vicky, one of the three
daughters of a despotic bootmaker in Hobson's Choice (1931), the
second of three screen versions of Harold Brighouse's popular comedy.
(Brighouse himself collaborated with Frank Launder on the screenplay.)
Chrystall's next film, The Frightened Lady (1932), was also based on
a play, Edgar Wallace's The Case of the Frightened Lady. Chrystall
was the lady in question, an aristocrat and reluctant houseguest at a
manor where guests are being strangled. Emlyn Williams and Cathleen
Nesbitt co-starred in the effectively chilling thriller (remade in
1940 with Penelope Dudley Ward as the heroine).
She was back with the team of Victor Saville as director and Michael
Balcon as producer for Friday the Thirteenth (1933), an enjoyable
omnibus film which depicts 24 hours in the lives of a disparate group
of people who are all destined to be passengers in a bus that
crashes. Chrystall and Frank Lawton touchingly played young lovers
who become involved with a crook (Emlyn Williams).
In the convoluted thriller The Scotland Yard Mystery (1933), she was
the fiancée of a doctor suspected of being involved in a scheme to
defraud insurance companies by injecting policy holders with a life-
suspending serum that disguises their imminent death (the film was
called The Living Dead in the United States).
Chrystall's next few films, including Youthful Folly and The Girl in
the Flat (both 1934) were undistinguished. By the time she made Key
to Harmony (1935), a weak romantic drama in which she played an
actress who almost loses her musician husband when success goes to
his head, it was clear that her movie career was drifting.
She had her best role in some time when the director Michael Powell
chose her to play the heroine in the first film to display Powell's
prowess as a poet of cinema, Edge of the World (1937), filmed on
Foula, a remote island in the North Sea. Chrystall played a girl
whose father (John Laurie) is feuding with the family of her lover.
In Follow Your Star (1938) she starred opposite the popular crooner
Arthur Tracy (known as "The Street Singer").
She then inherited another of her better later roles when Diana
Churchill withdrew from Yellow Sands (1938) in order to honeymoon
with her husband, Barry K. Barnes, and Chrystall replaced her.
Directed by Herbert Brenon, it was a film of great charm in which an
old lady (Marie Tempest) devises her will to best benefit her friends
in a small Cornish village. A play by Richard Llewellyn was the basis
for Chrystall's penultimate film, Poison Pen (1939), in which she was
a wife wrongly suspected of having a lover. Robert Newton played her
husband provoked to homicide by the lies of anonymous letters in a
gripping adaptation directed by Paul L. Stein.
Over the next few years Chrystall's voice became well-known to radio
listeners on such shows as Saturday Night Theatre, her name becoming
as familiar as such other BBC stalwarts as Gladys Young, Grizelda
Hervey and Marjorie Westbury. She also did some modelling, and for a
time was the face of Lux soap. In 1946 she married and announced her
retirement. "I adored my career on screen and the adulation it
brought me," she stated. "But it was no substitute for marriage and a
family."
In 1978 Michael Powell made a documentary, Return to the Edge of the
World, which framed the original footage with a newly filmed record
of a poignant reunion in Shetland of surviving cast and crew
members. "John Laurie and I tramped the hills together," he later
wrote, "and talked of Belle Chrystall, who had refused to join us,
preferring to leave her 1937 image the way it was."
Tom Vallance
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