Dilys Powell

in 1984 © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies / National Portrait Gallery

Elizabeth Dilys Powell, CBE (20 July 1901 – 3 June 1995) was an English journalist who wrote for the The Sunday Times for over fifty years. Powell was best known as a film critic, noted for her receptiveness to cultural change in the cinema, and she coined many classic phrases about films and actors. She was also one of the founder members of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), which launched commercial TV in the UK.

Early life and education

Powell was born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, to Thomas Powell, a bank manager, and Mary Jane Lloyd. Powell attended Talbot Heath School, Bournemouth before reading modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford.

While at Oxford she met an archaeologist, Humfry Payne (19 February 1902 – 9 May 1936), whom she was to marry in 1926.

Career

After her graduation with a first-class honours degree, Powell spent a period as personal assistant to Lady Ottoline Morrell before joining the literary department of The Sunday Times in 1928.

In 1929 her husband, Payne, was appointed director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens. From 1931 to 1936, Powell spent part of each year in Greece, frequently attending excavations, where her husband was working. Payne died in Athens in 1936 due to a staphylococcus infection; they had no children.

She continued her periodic visits to Greece after 1936, until the Second World War intervened. In 1939 Powell was appointed film critic at The Sunday Times, and in 1941 she found war work with a Greek connection in the Political Warfare Executive, which oversaw Britain's propaganda in occupied Europe. In June 1943 she married Leonard Russell (1906–1974), the literary editor at The Sunday Times.[1]

Powell was one of the founder members of the Independent Television Authority (ITA) from 1954, despite initial concerns about her possible conflicts of interest (she wrote for a newspaper that was backing one of the ITV franchises, but its bid was eventually withdrawn). She resigned her post at the ITA in 1956 in protest at the government's refusal to come up with funding which it had promised to the authority in the Television Act 1954.

Her journalism led a change in the writing of cinema criticism. To quote from the British Film Institute: "... she was open to new directions in cinema and was not constrained by the middle class shibboleths of "good taste", unlike her rival C. A. Lejeune, film critic for The Observer from 1928 to 1960." She remained film critic at The Sunday Times until 1979 — a compilation of her reviews was published in 1989 as The Golden Screen — but beginning in 1976 she also began writing about films on television, and continued to do so until the end of her life. Her last piece, a review of Barry Lyndon, appeared in The Times on the day of her death. She also served as film critic for Punch until its first closure in 1992.[2][3]

She had a gift for the pithy comment, and her memorable phrases about films and the people of the film world are still frequently quoted by other journalists. In addition to her journalism she appeared on radio, as a contestant on the BBC radio panel game My Word!, for nearly thirty years and wrote books about film and travel, particularly about Greece.

Publications

References

  1. ↑ Haag, M (June 5, 1995). Obituary: Dilys Powell. The Independent archive. Retrieved March 21, 2013
  2. ↑ Haag, Michael (5 June 1995). "OBITUARY: Dilys Powell". The Independent. U.K.
  3. ↑ "Dilys Powell, Film Critic, 93". NY Times. 6 June 1995.

Sources

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