The throaty persuasions of contralto Hilary Summers – Miss Prism in Barry's Earnest – excelled as White Queen and Dormouse.
It was an all-male school, and I was among those who auditioned for the role of Mother Courage, but guess who wound up playing her? David Edgar!" He was soon to abandon his dreams of a career as an actor after a little tactful maternal advice: "I was playing Miss Prism in a school production of The Importance of Being Earnest," Edgar recalls.
If we could be taught by Miss Prisms in our lives, it would be so much more fun, wouldn't it?" Ms. Massey comes from a celebrated theatrical family; her father was Raymond Massey, her mother was Adrianne Allen, the British stage actress, and her brother was Daniel Massey.
The mouth is puckered into a disapproving slit when Miss Prism is in pedagogical mode, but a hint of roguishness softens her businesslike demeanor when she is in the presence of the gallant Rev. Canon Chasuble.
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily; that is what Fiction means," as the didactic governess Miss Prism puts it in "The Importance of Being Earnest".
Stoppard fleetingly considered making him the equivalent of Miss Prism, the governess in "The Importance" — "but that," he wisely concluded, "would have killed the play because of the trivialization".
Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism tells Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest to avoid reading a chapter on the fall of the rupee since "it is somewhat too sensational".
When wrong is committed, it is usually punished, thus fulfilling Miss Prism's summation in Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), to the effect that in a novel the good characters end up happily and the bad characters unhappily: "that is why it is called fiction".
Her partnership with Smith was revived in 1993 when she played Miss Prism to Smith's Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Aldwych, a characterisation marked by its originality.
Variously cast in roles such as nannies, nuns and nurses, Massey starred in dozens of British and American films, including The Importance of Being Earnest (as Miss Prism, 2002) and Possession (2002) and, in particular, television productions, which were far more rewarding.
