Peter Stanford - Bronwen Astor - Her Life and Times

She had taken over in 1942 from the founder, Elsie Fogerty, and it was her dynamism during her long reign until 1967 which transformed Central into an internationally renowned drama school and ultimately saw it move away in 1957 from the Royal Albert Hall to bespoke premises in the old Embassy Theatre at Swiss Cottage. Admittance was by interview and audition with ‘Thurby’, as she was known to staff and pupils. She could appear very stern, recalls Margaret Braund, Bronwen’s drama teacher at Dr Williams’, a graduate of Central and later a tutor there, ‘but she was also very kind, very understanding and knew in a minute what students were or weren’t capable of achieving.’ As well as a stage course, Central also offered three-year diploma courses for speech and drama teachers and for speech therapists. Thurburn believed all three to be of equal merit. ‘There is something,’ she once wrote, ‘uniting everybody in this school – actors, teachers, speech therapists. For me it certainly is the voice, being the centre of all communication.’

Though the recommendation from Miss Braund may have helped Bronwen in her interview, she would not have got in unless Gwynneth Thurburn had spotted some talent in her. With hindsight, Margaret Braund believes it may have been Bronwen’s voice. ‘Her voice had a very pleasing quality, and it was very flexible. She had grown quickly into a good actress but it is her voice that stands out in my memory.’ All three courses at Central were officially on a par, but it was the actors’ diploma which carried most glamour. The eighteen-year-old Bronwen Pugh nursed ambitions to be on the stage, but she applied instead for the teachers’ course.

Part of it was a lack of confidence. She may have shone in the small pond of Dr Williams’ school productions, but was unsure how her credits from rural Wales would fare when placed alongside a string of leading roles in cosmopolitan youth theatres. Though physically now an adult, there was still a legacy of immaturity from her sheltered school years and her treatment as the baby of the family. And there was also a vulnerability about her that at this stage of her life was linked to that immaturity, but which remained ever after, even when she had learnt about the world in sometimes the cruellest ways. Fear of rejection, of being among people who do not want her there, has been one of the strong emotions in her life, a practical weakness set against and sometimes curtailing another of her enduring qualities, her willingness to strike out on bold, unexpected and often criticised paths with an unshakeable belief that she is somehow being guided from above on a predetermined spiritual journey.

Many of her rivals for one of the coveted places on the Central actors’ course, she believed, would have been living and breathing the dream of treading the boards from the cradle, while she had come late and not entirely wholeheartedly to the idea. It was for her less a vocation, more a cross between an alternative to Oxford, something to do, a gesture of defiance and a way to be different from her sisters. Moreover, she lacked the firm parental support that might have given her, at an impressionable age, the confidence to opt for acting. Alun Pugh, whom she looked up to above all others, who taught her that if you do anything you must be the best at it, may have agreed to pay the two pounds, six shillings per term, but there was little of the instinctive sympathy for his daughter’s choice that would have greeted a decision to apply to Oxford. He had his youngest daughter down to succeed as a headmistress, so the teachers’ course was at least a compromise between her option and his.

There was a further complicating factor – one that was to haunt Bronwen throughout her professional life. The Goodyear genes made for tall women and all the Pugh girls were giants. Gwyneth was just over six foot, her mother and two sisters just under. So Bronwen was deemed by the standards of the day too tall to be a successful actress. Even in later, more tolerant times tall actresses like Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver have struggled to find female leads (she was sidelined into science fiction), but back in the 1940s anyone over five foot six faced a bleak future. Leading men had to gaze masculinely down on their petite feminine charges – women like Celia Johnson, Olivia de Havilland and Audrey Hepburn. Actresses approaching six foot would find it impossible to persuade casting directors of their merits. Of Bronwen’s generation, only the well-connected and extraordinarily talented Vanessa Redgrave – for whom she was once mistaken while on a plane – became a star despite her height.

And the slight cast in her eye, corrected by surgery in childhood but set to return at various stages of her life, also counted against her in the theatrical world of the 1940s and 1950s. Though today actresses like Imogen Stubbs have won acclaim despite having a squint, four decades ago it was considered an insurmountable obstacle to success on the stage.

Bronwen was unusually realistic for an eighteen-year-old about her own talent – or lack of it. It was as if simply being at Central – rather than Oxford – was enough for her. ‘I think that great actresses succeed because they can let go of themselves and become totally someone else. I think that even at that stage I knew myself well enough to know that I couldn’t do that. Obviously later there was an element of letting go in being a model girl, but then it was not about taking on another character. It was simply letting go. I could go half the way, but I was too self-conscious to be an actress.’

Perhaps the final deciding factor was the encouragement of her mentor, Margaret Braund, who was also pushing her towards the teachers’ course. ‘It was not that I didn’t believe in her as an actress. It was rather that I knew she was an intelligent girl and one who would need academic stimulus. You got more of that in the third year of the teachers’ course. For the first two it was virtually the same as the stage course, but in the third year the teachers did subjects like psychology and phonetics. And I also thought that she would make a good teacher. She had imagination and ideas and she could inspire others if she wanted to. Though at this stage she was still quite young for her years, she was quite mature in her dealings with others.’

After decamping from Dolgellau a term early, she spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Hampstead – part of it acting as housekeeper to her father while her mother packed up their home in Norfolk. Alun Pugh and his youngest daughter also went off together for a motoring holiday in Europe. The stated reason was so that Bronwen could practise her skills as a driver there. She was at the wheel most of the time and although driving on the opposite side of the road might not be considered as the best preparation for the British test, she nevertheless passed with flying colours on her return. ‘We were always taught that getting your driving test was as important, if not more important, than getting your highers. It made you mobile and therefore independent. Being independent was the big thing.’

The real purpose of the trip to the continent, however, was to revisit some of the battlegrounds where Alun Pugh had served in the First World War. Father and daughter did not get as far as the trenches or the graveyards. When it came to that point, he couldn’t go on. ‘He wanted to try, but he couldn’t face it. He didn’t talk about it at all. I was just there.’ The silence that seemed to encase the details of her father’s wartime trauma persisted, but Bronwen became even more acutely aware of the pain it continued to cause him. Perhaps Alun Pugh chose his youngest daughter as his companion on this trip precisely because he knew that she – unlike her more assertive older sisters – would not press him to discuss topics that were difficult for him. She was content simply to let him be.