b. Elizabeth Anne Seal, 28 August 1933, Genoa, Italy. A dynamic, vivacious dancer, singer, and actress, Elizabeth Seal won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dancing at the age of five. As a teenager she was in the chorus of several shows, including Gay’s The Word in the West End, and in the mid-50s made a big impression in two US musicals at the London Coliseum - The Pajama Game (Gladys) and Damn Yankees (Lola). In the latter she took over from Belita shortly after the opening. However, she enjoyed her greatest success in the English adaptation of Irma La Douce (1958), and reprised her role in New York, winning the 1961 Best Actress Tony Award in the face of competition from Julie Andrews, Carol Channing, and Nancy Walker. Out of the limelight for some years after that triumph, she was set to make her West End comeback as Cassie in A Chorus Line (1976), but was ‘sacked’ during rehearsals by Michael Bennett, the show’s director. The appearance on the scene of Bennett’s wife, Donna McKechnie, who had played Cassie on Broadway, sparked off furious protests within the profession. They resulted in McKechnie’s withdrawal, and radical rule changes by Equity, the actor’s union. Ironically, three years after Seal appeared in the 1976 revival of Salad Days, she was involved in another Equity dispute. Having taken over the role of Roxie Hart in Chicago at the Cambridge Theatre, she and other members of the cast were threatened with blacklisting after they offered to take wage cuts in an attempt to keep the show running. The outcome was that Equity invested its own funds in an effort to keep their members in work. Thereafter she devoted much of her time to teaching and directing, but continued to make occasional appearances in regional theatre, including one in Stepping Out (1991), which she also choreographed. In 1996, to the delight of those attending the celebrations for composer David Heneker’s 90th birthday, Elizabeth Seal reunited with her Irma La Douce co-star Keith Michell in the show’s big ballad, ‘Our Language Of Love’. In the following year, Seal played the role of Solange in a special concert performance of Follies at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.