Louisa Horton Hill

Louisa Horton Hill was a stage, film and television actress and the former wife of George Roy Hill (obituary, December 30, 2002), the director of the Oscar-winning film The Sting. She made her film debut in All My Sons (1948) opposite Burt Lancaster and Edward G. Robinson, and other movie credits include the film Swashbuckler (1976), which starred James Earl Jones and Robert Shaw.

She was born in China and raised in Haiti and the Washington DC area. (She was a descendant of John Cabell Breckinridge, a general in the Confederate Army, a US Senator and Vice President under James Buchanan, and of the Rev John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and signatory of of the Declaration of Independence).

As Louisa Horton she starred on Broadway in the 1940s in The Voice of the Turtle, a romantic comedy set in Manhattan which ran for three years. Later she was in O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet with Jason Robards, directed by Jose Quintero.

She met Hill while both were actors in a Shakespeare repertory company. They married in 1951 and remained close even after they divorced in the 1970s.

In 1989 Horton Hill played the mother of a lesbian daughter in the off-Broadway production The Blessing. She also appeared in many live television dramatic series.

In later life she became an active advocate for women in prison. She was a founder of Justice Works, an outreach organisation for families of prisoners, and of the Gethesmane Church in Brooklyn.

Louisa Horton Hill, actress, was born on September 10, 1924. She died on January 25, 2008, aged 83