Interview: Cynthia Morey - Still on song in her eighties

She may be well into her eighties, but former actress and soprano Cynthia Morey is as busy as ever.

Since retiring from the stage and moving to Cholsey 22 years ago, she has become president of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, written several books and even made her debut on the silver screen.

That’s as well as giving regular talks about her life in the theatre and directing amateur productions of musicals and the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

When we meet at her Cholsey home, she has just returned from a Gilbert and Sullivan Society Convention at Grim’s Dyke, Gilbert’s former house at Harrow Weald, London.

“That took a whole weekend,” she says. “As president I had to sit at the top table and reply to the Duke of Gloucester’s speech, and also give a talk. It was lovely.”

Despite performing with the D’Oyly Carte for just six years in a career spanning four decades, and later becoming known for her roles with Sadler’s Wells and in West End musicals, it is Cynthia’s reputation as a Gilbert and Sullivan performer that has endured.

She was born in Southsea in 1927, later moving first to Croydon and then to Leamington, and grew up surrounded by music.

“My mother played the piano beautifully, and she sang in oratorios. My brother played in a dance band and my sister played the piano as well, so there was always music going on.”

Cynthia’s introduction to Gilbert and Sullivan came in the spring of 1949, when she joined the Warwick and Leamington Operatic Society for a production of The Pirates of Penzance.

“I was cast as Edith,” she recalls. “And I thought there was nothing like it in the world. We were taken in a party to see the D’Oyly Carte doing Pirates in Northampton. The minute the curtain went up, I knew there were two things I had to do — a) to go on the stage and b) to join the D’Oyly Carte.”

After spending two years at the Royal College of Music, Cynthia was impatient to get onstage, so she auditioned for the D’Oyly Carte. To her amazement, she was offered a chorister’s contract on the spot — “at £8 a week,” she laughs.

She made her professional debut with the D’Oyly Carte in May 1951, and three years later was promoted to principal soprano, playing Yum-Yum (The Mikado), Phyllis (Iolanthe), Rose Maybud (Ruddigore), Lady Psyche (Princess Ida) and the title role in Patience.

She looks back on her D’Oyly Carte days with a mixture of affection and exasperation.

“It was a lot of fun, but it was a very strange company. It was a bit like being in a boarding school when you were on tour. And you were never addressed by your Christian name — it was always Miss Morey. It was extraordinary, really.

“And they were so particular that you did exactly what Gilbert had laid down right at the beginning. We weren’t allowed to depart from that.”

After six years with the company, Cynthia was keen to spread her wings. She spent a couple of years performing in pantomime and summer shows before joining Sadler’s Wells and later English National Opera, both of which brought her into contact with former D’Oyly Carte colleagues.

“Sadler’s Wells was great because they treated everybody in the chorus as a professional singer and someone of some importance. Gradually I did little parts there. Then Wendy Toye started doing the Offenbach operettas, which was so me. I immediately played some roles in those, and went to Australia with them doing Orpheus in the Underworld, and The Merry Widow later on.”

Meanwhile, she had met Anthony Jennings, a clarinettist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the couple married in 1964.

“We’re still together — we’ve just had our golden wedding anniversary. I expect it’s because we’ve been apart most of the time,” she chuckles.

Cynthia later moved into musicals, performing frequently in the West End and on tour in shows such as My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof and Me and My Girl.

Her final West End performance was in Anything Goes at the Prince Edward Theatre in 1990.

Since then, her life has once again become dominated by Gilbert and Sullivan. As well as her presidency of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, she has also been involved with the Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton and, memorably, was putting on a Gilbert and Sullivan concert in Philadelphia around the time of the 9/11 attack.

Her reputation as a Gilbert and Sullivan singer led, in 2011, to being invited to reprise the role of Yum-Yum in the Dustin Hoffman film Quartet, in which she plays retired opera singer Lottie Yates.

For three months, a limousine arrived at the gates of her Cholsey home to whisk her off to the film set in Buckinghamshire.

“It was wonderful, I loved it,” she says. “To be picked up in a limousine at 5.30 in the morning was very grand. Dustin Hoffman treated everyone with such respect, so it was a joy.”

Cynthia’s Cholsey years have also seen her turn her hand to writing.

In 1998 she wrote a book about her D’Oyly Carte days, Inclined to Dance and Sing, followed in 2001 by A Set of Curious Chances, which charts her post-D’Oyly Carte career.

In 2006 she used her experiences of directing amateur productions to write a novel, A World That’s All Our Own, and in the same year co-wrote the autobiography of the late D’Oyly Carte comedian John Reed, one of her closest friends in the company.

Her most recent book, Dark is the Dawn, was published in 2009 and describes her childhood in wartime Leamington.

At 87, Cynthia clearly has no intention of slowing down just yet. “Retire? What is that word?” she laughs.

Whatever the future holds for her, it’s sure to involve plenty of Gilbert and Sullivan.