Elizabeth Sellars, Glasgow-born actress who shot to stardom on the London stage in the scandalous Tea and Sympathy obituary – Telegraph.co.uk

Elizabeth Sellars, the stage and screen actress, who has died aged 98, made her name on the postwar West End stage in Tea and Sympathy. Set in a New England boys boarding school, Robert Andersons drama created something of a sensation in an era still subject to official stage censorship: it showed the wife of a housemaster seducing a pupil branded as homosexual.

For such a subject to form the theme of a West End play in 1957, without mutilation from the censor, the theatre itself had to be turned into a club. For the run of the play, and of others in a season including Arthur Millers A View from the Bridge, the Comedy Theatre in Panton Street became the New Watergate Theatre Club. As a place of private entertainment with a nominal subscription for members, it escaped the need for the Lord Chamberlains licence.

Not that the seduction of the boy by the housemasters wife was undertaken without the greatest theatrical tact. Nor did the rumour of the adolescents homosexuality prove other than unfounded.

To explain the impropriety of the wifes conduct, she was shown to have been not only a former actress, but also unhappily married to a negligent and insensitive husband, while the persecuted young object of her sympathy strikingly resembled her first, dead husband.

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Elizabeth Sellars, Glasgow-born actress who shot to stardom on the London stage in the scandalous Tea and Sympathy obituary - Telegraph.co.uk