| Biography | Dorothy Jane (Thea) Phillips (1892-1960), soprano and teacher of singing, was born on Christmas Eve 1892 at Dorchester, Dorset, England, daughter of David Phillips, clothier and outfitter, and his wife Emma, née Chapple. Dorothy made her operatic début at Manchester before she was 20, studied singing with Emma Molajoli at Milan, Italy, and sang at Naples with Tullio Serafin. On 18 July 1916 at the register office, King's Norton, Birmingham, she married Robert Alfred Clement Pike, a 39-year-old divorcee and a lieutenant in the Army Ordnance Department.
After the birth of their three sons, Dorothy embarked on a professional singing career, leaving her husband, from whom she was to be divorced in 1935. Her early engagements included revues and seaside concerts, but she later worked in opera and oratorio. In 1930 she caught the attention of Sir Thomas Beecham and made her London début as Agatha in Der Freischütz to excellent reviews. Concert and opera engagements followed in London and the provinces, but the highlight of her career was her appearance before the royal family in May 1932 at Covent Garden, when she replaced Lotte Lehmann as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser.
'Thea Philips', as she was by then known professionally, arrived in Australia in 1934 to perform with Sir Benjamin Fuller's grand opera company in a six-month Melbourne-Sydney season. She sang both lyric and dramatic soprano roles in Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, Faust, Die Walküre, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, La Bohème and Die Fledermaus. Although overshadowed by Florence Austral, she was well received. Further engagements extended her stay to more than three years. She performed in a 1935-36 season of studio broadcast operas, and toured for the Australian Broadcasting Commission and its New Zealand counterpart.
Philips made the first of nineteen appearances as soprano for the (Royal) Melbourne Philharmonic Society in September 1935. In the following year she was soloist in Verdi's Requiem with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. She returned to Britain late in 1938 and sang Marguerite in Faust at the Royal Albert Hall, but was back in Australia before the outbreak of World War II. Her professional life for the next decade consisted mostly of appearances in oratorio and recitals, with some adjudication and teaching. She sang with leading Victorian choirs and appeared in Sydney for the A.B.C. At the Congregational manse, Kew, on 4 December 1941 she married Claude Mackay Wallis, a 53-year-old widower and an accountant.
She died of heart disease on 15 November 1960 in a Goulburn Street hotel and was cremated with Presbyterian forms. Her husband survived her, as did two of the sons of her first marriage. |