Biography
Elsa Chauvel (1898–1983), actress and filmmaker, was born Elsie May on 10 February 1898 in Collingwood, Melbourne. She was the second of three children of Edward Wilcox, a tinsmith from New South Wales, and his wife Ada Marie (née Worrall) from Queensland. During Elsie's childhood, the family moved to South Africa, where Wilcox, performing under the stage names Silveni or Sylvaney, established a traveling troupe that included Elsie (also known as Sylvaney) and her older brother, who performed as Kyrle McAlister. Later, Elsie and her brother joined various theatrical companies in Cape Town and Johannesburg. After a successful tour of Basutoland managed by Kyrle, they returned to Australia in 1924.
Elsie was petite and attractive, with dark hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. While performing in the musical Crackers in Brisbane, she met film director Charles Edward Chauvel, who cast her as the lead in his second feature film, Greenhide (1926). Known thereafter as Elsa, she married Charles on 5 June 1927 at St James’s Church of England in Sydney. The following year, they traveled to the United States to advance Charles’s career in Hollywood. Elsa returned to the stage in San Francisco and Los Angeles, performing in Mid-Channel. Upon returning to Australia, she performed sporadically, appearing in Brisbane (1929), Stanthorpe (1930–31), and Sydney (1939). In Stanthorpe, she supplemented their income by teaching elocution and dance. Fourteen months after their daughter was born in 1930, the family relocated to Sydney, living in Vaucluse, then Pymble, and finally Castlecrag.
In a 1934 magazine article, Elsa stated that a woman’s role was to charm men, to love, and to serve them—a role she fulfilled in both her professional and personal partnership with Charles. Together, they produced seven more feature films, traveling to Pitcairn Island and Tahiti for In the Wake of the Bounty (1933) and to the Australian interior for Jedda (1955). During World War II, they created documentaries, and in 1956–57, they traveled through the outback filming the television series Walkabout for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Charles was the public figure of their company, credited as director and producer.
Following Charles’s death in 1959, Elsa continued to promote Australian cinema and collected prints of Chauvel films for preservation in the national film archive. She was appointed OBE in 1964 and served as vice-president (1965–76), senior vice-president (1977–78), and patron (1979–82) of the Royal New South Wales Institution for Deaf & Blind Children. She also worked with Dr Barnardo’s in Australia. Elsa published her memoirs, My Life with Charles Chauvel, in 1973. In 1977, she moved from Sydney to Toowoomba, Queensland, where she died on 22 August 1983 and was cremated. She was survived by her daughter.
