That Special Relationship: Dolores Gray, Mary Martin, and Elaine Stritch on the Postwar London Stage

The essay traces the development of a ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States between 1945 and 1982 in cultural terms by examining the career and reception of the three female American musical theatre stars who achieved the highest profile in the United Kingdom—Dolores Gray, Mary Martin, and Elaine Stritch. Their performances were imbricated within changing postwar understandings of femininity, typifying for British audiences the modernity that the United States had come to represent. Their comparatively liberated assertion of ‘naturalness’ in speech and behaviour replaced the class-bound formality of British performances of gender and sexuality with the less repressed images of American identity. The particular affection with which these three stage stars were embraced manifested changes in British attitudes to themselves and to the popular culture of the United States.