Elizabeth Dilys Powell (20 July 1901 – 3 June 1995) was a British film critic and travel writer who contributed to The Sunday Times for more than 50 years. Powell was known for her receptiveness to cultural change in the cinema and coined many classic phrases about films and actors. She was a founding member of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), which launched commercial television in the UK. She was also the second female president of the Classical Association. Powell wrote several books on films and her travels in Greece.
Early life and education
Dilys Powell was born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, to Thomas Powell (a bank manager) and Mary Jane Lloyd. She attended Talbot Heath School, Bournemouth before winning an exhibition to read Modern Languages at Somerville College, Oxford.
Powell considered studying Classics (Literae Humaniores) – "Greats" – at Oxford University, but she was advised against it by her brother: '"Don't" he said; "the Classics are a terrible grind for a girl, and you will be prematurely wrinkled."' Powell took his advice, but later regretted it, feeling that she had been robbed of "deep and solid pleasures", having "small Latin...and, goodness knows, less Greek".
In 1929, her husband Humfry Payne was appointed director of the British School at Athens. From 1931 to 1936, Powell spent part of each year in Greece, frequently attending excavations where her husband was working, including the excavation of the Heraion of Perachora, as well as attending an excavation at Abydos, Egypt. Payne died in Athens in 1936 from a staphylococcus infection. They had no children.
Powell continued her periodic visits to Greece after 1936, until the Second World War made travel difficult. In 1939 Powell was appointed film critic at The Sunday Times. In 1941, she found war work with a Greek connection in the Political Warfare Executive, which oversaw Britain's propaganda in occupied Europe; she remained there until 1945, where she was tasked with making sure that the BBC's broadcasts to Greece accurately represented British policies. In June 1943, she married Leonard Russell (1906–1974), the literary editor at The Sunday Times.
Powell was one of the founding members of the Independent Television Authority (ITA) from 1954, despite initial concerns about her possible conflicts of interest (she wrote for a newspaper that was backing one of the ITV network franchises, but its bid was eventually withdrawn). She resigned her post at the ITA in 1956, in protest at the government's refusal to come up with funding which it had promised to the authority in the Television Act 1954.
Powell, a philhellene, made frequent visits to Greece, including attending the British School at Athens excavations at Emporio on Chios in 1954 in order to report on the excavations for The Sunday Times. awarded a British Film Institute Fellowship in 1983, and made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford University, in 1991. Powell was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Publications
- Descent from Parnassus (1934), London: Cresset Press (essays on modern poets)
- Remember Greece (1941), London: Hodder & Stoughton
- The Traveller's Journey is Done (1943), London: Hodder & Stoughton (Humfry Payne at the British School of Archaeology at Athens)
- Films since 1939 (1947), London: Longmans, Green & Co (for the British Council)
- Coco (1952), London: Hodder & Stoughton (biography of a dog)
- An Affair of the Heart (1958), London: Hodder & Stoughton
- The Mirror of the Present (1967), London: John Murray (presidential address to the Classical Association at the University of Reading)
- The Villa Ariadne (1973), London: Hodder and Stoughton. New edition by Eland in 2016:
- The Golden Screen: Fifty Years at the Films (1989), London: Pavilion, (ed. George Perry)
- The Dilys Powell film reader (1991), Manchester: Carcanet,