Diana Napier

Who was Diana Napier?

Diana Napier was a British film actor. She was born Alice Mary Ellis in Bath, Somerset, on 31 January 1905. She died in Windelsham, Surrey on 12 March 1982, aged 77.

Napier, known to her family as "Mollie", was married three times. Her first husband was the actor G.H. Mulcaster whom she married in 1927 and later divorced. Her second was the Austrian tenor, Richard Tauber, to whom she was married from 1936 until his death, and her third was the Polish artist, Stanislaw Wolkowicki whom she had met during the war [when she worked for the Polish Red Cross] and married in 1953. He died in 1965, and she was buried with him in the Churchyard of St. Michael and All Angels, Sunningdale, Berkshire in 1982.

Napier was the daughter of Major APB Ellis, an ENT specialist and sometime army surgeon, and Alice Napier. She took her mother's maiden name as her screen name. Having spent much of her childhood in South Africa, where she attended the Maris Stella School in Durban, the family returned to England and she embarked on a stage career. After a few years in repertory, she was offered a screen test by Alexander Korda, and made a few films before he dropped her. She then appeared in 1935 opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in Mimi, a film directed by Paul L. Stein, a childhood friend of Richard Tauber, who had directed Tauber's first British film Blossom Time in 1934. It was through Paul Stein she met Tauber, and appeared with him in three films made in 1935/36, the first of them, Heart's Desire, under Stein's direction. For five years, 1935 until 1940, she rented the Villa Capri at Elstree, where she lived with Tauber from the time of their marriage.