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Doris Lytton

actor

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 10, 2025
Entity authorityQ29879516
Source-derived summary

Doris Lytton (January 23, 1893 – December 2, 1953) was an English actress on stage and in silent films, and a businesswoman in the 1920s. Later, as Doris Lytton Toye, she wrote a cookbook tailored for post-war shortages, Contemporary Cookery (1947).

Early life

Doris Lytton Partington was born in Manchester.

Career

Doris Lytton performed in plays on the London stage from her girlhood, including The Conqueror (1905), For the Crown (1905), J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1907), Cicely Hamilton's feminist comedy Diana of Dobson's (1908, 1909), Might is Right (1909), Inconstant George (1910), Cosmo Hamilton's The Blindness of Virtue (1913), Never Say Die (1913), J. M. Barrie's Dear Brutus (1917), Husbands for All (1920), Reginald Berkeley's French Leave (1920), The Fulfilling of the Law (1921), A Matter of Fact (1921), Trespasses (1923), The Confession (1925), Harley Granville-Barker's The Madras House (1925-1926), Behold the Bridegroom (1931), King Queen Knave (1932), Suspect (1937).

Silent films featuring Doris Lytton included The Blue Bird (1910), The Brass Bottle (1914), The Single Man (1919), Mutiny (1925). She was also in the cast of a 1942 BBC Home Service production of The King Comes to His Own, a Biblical drama by Dorothy L. Sayers.

In 1920, Lytton opened a shop called "Cinderella" in the West End of London, offering repairs for "expensive evening dress shoes". A newspaper writer praised her effort as "an example of the new woman who has gone into business for herself and made good."

Lytton was known to sew and embroider backstage, and enjoyed cooking. "I have loved to cook ever since I was a wee thing and had a toy cook stove," she explained to an American reporter while on tour in the United States in 1913. From 1945 to 1947 Doris Lytton Toye wrote a monthly cookery column for Vogue magazine, with illustrations by Denton Welch.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Doris Lytton” as actor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Doris, Lytton and actor.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1893, 1953, 1947, 1905—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1893-01-23. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Doris, Lytton and actor providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Doris Lytton”, the useful work is to connect “actor” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q29879516. VIAF identifies the subject as 314907713. The Library of Congress control number is no2015025238. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1953, 1947 and 1905.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

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  • Building a first chronology
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Doris Lytton”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Doris Lytton primary sources, Doris Lytton archive and Doris research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Doris Lytton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.