| Biography | Wendy Toye CBE (1 May 1917 27 February 2010) was a British dancer, stage and film director and actress.
Beryl May Jessie ("Wendy") Toye was born in London. She initially worked as a dancer and choreographer both on stage and on film, collaborating with the likes of directors Jean Cocteau and Carol Reed. She directed the original production of Bless the Bride in 1947.
Toye's debut film short, The Stranger Left No Card (1952), won the Best Fictional Short Film prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, while her Christmas-themed short On the Twelfth Day
(1955) received an Oscar nomination in the Best Short Subject category. She directed films from the early 1950s until the early 1980s.
She was the head of the jury at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival in 1963. Toye also was an advisor to the Arts Council and lectured in Australia.
She was attacked and robbed in her maisonette in Westminster on 27 November 1956. Two men stole jewellery and money.
On 6 January 1958 she appeared as Roy Plomley's Guest on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs. Her choices were wide-ranging, including Bach, Mahler and Lena Horne.
Toye married Edward Selwyn Sharp in 1940; they divorced in 1950. She was awarded the Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977, and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1992 for services to the arts. She was made an honorary D. Litt. in 1996 by the City University.
She died on 27 February 2010 at Hillingdon Hospital, Greater London.
Among the many charities supported by Dr Toye were the Theatrical Guild (formerly the Theatrical Ladies' Guild), where she helped backstage and front-of-house staff, and became president, and the Actors' Charitable Trust, to which she was recruited by Noël Coward, and of which she was vice president.
She refused to write or authorise a biography during her lifetime, in spite of encouragement by her friends and family.
Her theatrical archive is mostly in the Wendy Toye Archive, V&A Theatre & Performance Department, THM/343 of the Victoria and Albert Museum, with some items in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.
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