stage school in London. In 1911, she was cast in the original production of Where the Rainbow Ends which opened to very good reviews on 21 December 1911. On 10 December 1912, the day after her 15th birthday, Gingold played Cassandra in William Poel's production of Troilus and Cressida at the King's Hall, Covent Garden, with Esmé Percy as Troilus and Edith Evans as Cressida. The following year she appeared in a musical production, The Marriage Market, in a small role in a cast that included Tom Walls, W H Berry, and Gertie Millar. In 1914, she played Jessica in The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic. In 1918, Gingold married the publisher Michael Joseph, with whom she had two sons, the younger of whom, Stephen, became a pioneer of theatre in the round in Britain. 1920 to 1948 Gingold's adult stage career was slow to take off. She played Liza in If at the Ambassador's in May 1921, and the Old Woman in Ben Travers's farcical comedy The Dippers produced by Sir Charles Hawtrey at the Criterion in August 1922. In 1926 Gingold was divorced from Joseph. Later in the same year she married the writer and lyricist Eric Maschwitz, whom she divorced in 1945. She underwent a vocal crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s: she had hitherto described herself as "Shakespearian and soprano" but nodules on her vocal cords brought a drastic drop in pitch, about which she commented, "One morning it was Mozart and the next 'Old Man River'". The critic J. C. Trewin described her voice as "powdered glass in deep syrup". During this period she broadcast frequently for the BBC and established herself at the experimental theatre-club the Gate Theatre Studio in London, first as a serious actress and later in the genre for which she became famous, revue. According to The Times it was in Spread It Abroad (1936) a revue at another theatre, the Saville, with material by Herbert Farjeon that she truly found her milieu. In the 10 years from 1938, Gingold concentrated on revue, appearing in nine productions in the West End. The first four were The Gate Revue (transferred from the Gate to the Ambassadors, 1939), Swinging the Gate (1940), Rise Above It (1941) and Sky High (1942). During this period she and Hermione Baddeley established a stage partnership of what The Times called "briskly sustained mock-rivalry".