One of Simona's professional portraits for her acting career. Copywright John Vickers, London
Simona Vere Pakenham was born on 25 September 1916 in Taplow, Buckinghamshire. Simona never knew her father, Compton Pakenham, who left her mother Phil for another woman while Simona was still a baby. Compton was to repeat this behaviour on more than one occasion, and she was told that he was "a bad man who had married five wives". Despite this, Simona remained close to Compton's sisters Cynthia and Pinkie for the rest of their lives.
Simona's mother remarried, an officer in the Indian army, and joined him in India, so she was brought up by her maternal grandparents, known to the whole family as Ginny and Ginga. Her early childhood was spent in Edinburgh, and when her grandparents retired to Dieppe, Simona moved with them. Pigtails and Pernod recounts Simona's memories of her time in Dieppe.
Simona in 1930
When Simona finished school she trained as an actress at The Old Vic and following her training moved to the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where she met my grandfather Noel Iliff, who was the resident producer. Simona and Noel married in 1938 and my father was born the following year, while they were still living in Dublin.
During the war Simona and Noel lived in London and worked for the BBC, Noel as a drama producer and actor and Simona as a radio announcer and adapter of plays for broadcast. In the 1950s they formed the Noel Iliff Repertory Theatre Company, which did seasons in a number of theatres including the Gateway in Edinburgh and the Library Theatre in Manchester. Simona was the leading actress and also designed the costumes.
Simona's writing career began through her love for the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams with a critical biography in which she sought to “pass on to ordinary listeners like myself some of the joy I discovered when I found out the existence of Vaughan Williams”. Though she did not know him at the time she wrote the book, she became a friend of the composer and his wife Ursula, and, shortly before his death, collaborated with him on The First Nowell, a nativity play for soloists, chorus and small orchestra, for which she provided a libretto adapted from medieval pageants. This book was followed by five other works, the most recent published posthumously in 2011.
In 2008 she appeared in two documentary films made to mark the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death, Tony Palmer’s O Thou Transcendant and John Bridcut’s The Passions of Vaughan Williams.
Following Noel's death in 1984 Simona remarried, to Kenneth Middleton, and split her time between her flat in Camden Town and Ken's home in Oxfordshire, to which she moved permanently when Ken retired. Simona died, aged 94, in November 2010.
