Alice Fenyves

(1923- 2010)

Alice Marianne Broido (née Fenyves), known to family and friends as Lali, was born in Budapest on 29 April 1923, the second of two daughters of Leopold and Ilona Fenyves.

In 1929 the famly moved to Berlin. Leo and his brothers were directors of DeFAG, a company that made motor parts for the automobile and aviation industries. The family was Jewish and in 1939 Leo was appointed manager of the London branch, enabling him to move his family to the UK at a time when British immigration regulations were at their strictest.

Aged 16 and unable to speak English, Lali was enrolled as a boarder at Milton Mount College in Sussex. She attended the Slade School of Art in London between 1940-42 before embarking on war work. In 1945 she became assistant animator to Cynthia Whitby at Basic Films and in the summer of 1946 she joined British Animated Productions as an inbetweener on George Moreno's Bubble & Squeek cartoons. The staff were layed off in the summer of 1947 and Lali declined to return when production restarted in September, going on to take various jobs in the film industry including laboratory work. In 1949 she left the film industry due to the difficulties of obtaining continuity of work, and took a job in the Drawing Office of the Ministry of Labour, Ebury House, London. In 1950 she left to live and work in Italy, returning to England in 1953. From 1953-54 she worked in the Drawing Office of the Ministry of Transport, Millbank before returning to work in the film industry (sound editing) at Ealing Studios in 1954.

In 1955 Lali moved to St Ives in Cornwall where she married the artist Michael Broido and raised three children. They moved to Lewes in East Sussex in the 1990s, where Lali died in 2010.

[Many thanks to Lali’s daughter Frances Lord for providing the biographical information.]

Filmography

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