"The Little Lady (Lauri Devine), with Sonnie Hale and the Dancers" onstage in This Year of Grace (1928)
A very blurry shot, but here you can clearly see the painted stage 'flat' with the cut-out window in it, and the backdrop showing through from behind. The two performers are captured in mid-flow rather than the static pose seen in the 'Play Pictorial' cover.
C.B.Cochran stood in the place of the bride's father at the register-office wedding of Sonnie Hale and Jessie Matthews.
Sonnie, playing the "loud-mouthed back-slapping ex-dance partner" who tempts Jessie's middle-aged character back to the stage, bestows a cape around his leading lady's shoulders in A Nest of Robins (1957)
A very much scratched and battered picture of Sonnie as John Crawley, the headmaster in The French Mistress.
The mark on Sonnie's lip is a flaw in the image rather than a deformity — but Boo Laye doesn't look very happy to have her photo taken, and her young husband appears to be squinting horribly behind his glasses...
In a scene from "Come Out To Play" with Jessie Matthews at the Phoenix Theatre in 1940.
"Nimble dancer, engaging clown": A little less hair, a lot more confidence...
Onstage in The French Mistress.
A very rare image of Sonnie and Jessie's last brief stage appearance before devoting themselves fulltime to film acting: the short-lived Sally Who? in 1933.
'The years between': together again... in Nest of Robins.
