Constance Collier

January 22 1878 – April 25 1955

☆ English stage and film actress and acting coach. She wrote plays and films with Ivor Novello and she was the first person to be treated with insulin in Europe.

In the late 1920s Collier relocated to Hollywood where she became a voice coach and teacher in diction. This was during the tumultuous changeover from silent films to sound and many silent actors with no theatre training were scrambling for lessons. Her most famous pupil was arguably Colleen Moore.

ROPE (1948)

Constance Collier was an English stage and film actress, as well as acting coach, playwright and screenwriter. She made her stage debut at the age of three as Fairy Peasblossom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1893, she joined the infamous Gaiety Girls, a dance troupe based at the Gaiety Theatre in London.In 1907, she starred in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's extravagant revival of Antony and Cleopatra. In 1922, she appeared in the silent film The Bohemian Girl alongside Gladys Cooper and Ellen Terry.

In the late 1920s, she relocated to Hollywood, where she became a renowned acting and diction coach, ensuring actors a smooth transition from silent to talking films. She appeared in Stage Door (1937), with Katharine Hepburn. According to actress Natalie Schafer, "Collier was one of Kate Hepburn’s best friends, but the one she was mad about was Dietrich. Connie pursued Dietrich in the mid 1930s." When Collier died, her secretary, Phyllis Wilbourn, who was also her lover and partner, started working for Hepburn and lived with her. Alfred Hitchcock famously cast Collier in Rope (1948) specifically for the lesbian air she’d bring to a small part. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.