Occupation Film producer Movies The Last Post, Carry On Role Film producer | Name Dinah Shurey Years active 1923–1932 | |
Died 1963, Dorset, United Kingdom Similar People Alf Goddard, Frank Vosper, Moore Marriott, John Longden | ||
Dinah Shurey (1888 - 1963) was a British film producer and director of the late 1920s.
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Early life
Born in 1888 into a comfortable middle class family, Shurey's father Harry was a magazine and penny paper publisher. Some of Edgar Wallace's Sanders of the River stories first appeared in Harry Shurey's magazine The Weekly Tale Teller which was published from 8 May 1909 to 29 April 1916 (365 issues). During the First World War, Dinah Shurey worked for the French Red Cross as a canteen worker. She later worked with actor-manager Lena Ashwell to organise concerts for troops on the Western Front.
After the war, Shurey managed the acting couple Eva Moore and Henry V. Esmond.
Film career
Shurey's film career began with Teddington Film Company, for which she worked in a number of roles, graduating to assistant film director.
In May 1924, Shurey founded her own film production company, Britannia Films and in 1929 her own distribution company Showman Films. Shurey was the only female British film director of her day. Britannia made five films, two of which, Carry On and The Last Post Shurey directed herself.
In 1930, Shurey sued Film Weekly magazine for its hostile treatment of The Last Post and the assertion by the magazine's columnist Nerina Shute that women were incapable of directing films. Shurey won the case but by 1934 she was bankrupt.
No prints of The Last Post are known to survive and the film is one of the top ten films on the British Film Institute's most wanted list of lost British films.
Paul Rotha compared Shurey to Harry Bruce Woolfe, calling her "an upstanding Empire loyalist" who "had made some quite atrocious films".