Muriel Myee Steinbeck
Muriel Steinbeck in 1941
Born	21 July 1913 (1913-07-21) Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia
Died	20 July 1982(1982-07-20) (aged 68) Orange, New South Wales, Australia
Other names	Muriel Myee Nicholson Muriel Myee Aubrey
Occupations	Actress, drama school proprietor and tutor
Years active	1934–1966
Known for	Smithy
Children	1

Muriel Myee Steinbeck^[1] (21 July 1913 – 20 July 1982) was an Australian actress who worked extensively in radio, theatre, television and film. She is best known for her role in 1946 film Smithy (1946) and her lead role in Autumn Affair (1958–59), Australia's first television soap opera.

Steinbeck was born the youngest of four children of William Martin Steinbeck and Lily Clarissa (née Batten), in Broken Hill, New South Wales, where her father, a keen Shakespearean scholar was working as a headmaster and her mother was a member of the Sydney Repertory Club.^[2] Her family left Broken Hill when Steinbeck was five.

Steinbeck was educated in Newcastle and at Sydney Girls High (1926–1930), where taking an interest in acting, she often appeared in school plays.^[2] Her When the family moved to Sydney she became involved in amateur theatre, appearing in plays, particularly Shakespeare, such as The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream and becoming renowned for her performances in comedy and drama.^[3]

Steinbeck was appearing in a production of Beverley Nichols' Where the Crash Comes at Sydney Players' Club, when she was spotted by Lawrence H. Cecil of the ABC. He hired her to do radio drama and her career was launched.^[2] Her first radio play was The Silver Cord and her first serial lead was The Three Diggers (1938). She was later briefly under contract to James Raglan while he was producing at Colombia where she starred in Soldier of Fortune.^[4]

Steinbeck appeared in numerous radio serials in the 1950s and 1960s, including Blue Hills, Portia Faces Life, Gabrielle^[5][2] and Cattleman.^[6]

Steinbeck made her film debut in the wartime propaganda short, Eleventh Hour (1942), directed by Ken G. Hall. Hall then used her in another short, South West Pacific (1943).^[7] She made her feature film debut in A Son Is Born (1946), a melodrama where she played the lead role, of an unhappily married woman, alongside Peter Finch), and Ron Randell,^[8] who both went on to become major names.^[7]

The release of A Son is Born was delayed, to take advantage of publicity for her second film, Smithy, a biopic about Charles Kingsford Smith (played by Randell), where Steinbeck played his wife.^[9][5] The film was a commercial success, but Steinbeck said this initially hurt her theatre career, as producers assumed she would be too expensive to hire.^[10] She resisted heading overseas to further her career, electing to stay home with her daughter, as her marriage was breaking up. Australia made so few films at the time, so Steinbeck focused on radio and theatre work.^[10] Her profile was prominent enough, that she even endorsed chocolate and lipstick.^[7]

In 1949, Steinbeck played the role of Laura in horse-racing melodrama Into the Straight^[11] and in 1951, she featured in biopic Wherever She Goes, playing the mother of the character played by Eileen Joyce.^[12] She was then in 1954 film Long John Silver.^[7]

Steinbeck's final film role before her retirement was 1966 comedy They’re a Weird Mob, in which she played the wife of Chips Rafferty’s character.^[7]

Steinbeck appeared in 1954 series The Adventures of Long John Silver, playing the governor's wife.^[7] She went on to star in the lead role in Australia's first TV soap opera, Autumn Affair (1958), playing Julia Parrish, a middle-aged widowed mother who wrote popular novels.^[7]

In 1960, Steinbeck was in two TV plays – Thunder on Sycamore Street and Reflections in Dark Glasses, the latter of which was met with rave reviews. She also had a recurring role in the serial, Stormy Petrel, playing the wife of Captain Bligh.^[7][13]

From 1963, Steinbeck was a compere on the ABC's English for New Australians series, Making Friends. She also compered the 1963–1964 series Woman's World, focused on women's issues.^[7]

Steinbeck began appearing on the stage regularly at the Minerva Theatre in Sydney's Kings Cross. She was in such productions as Spring Tide (1941), Claudia (1942), Watch on the Rhine (1942), Janie (1943), and The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse (1943).^[14]

In between film engagements, Steinbeck continued to work in theatre, appearing in Dangerous Corner (1946), The Third Visitor (1946), Clutterbuck (1947), and I Have Been Here Before (1948).

In 1950, Steinbeck starred as Portia in The Merchant of Venice with John Alden Company.^[15] In 1961, she was in another production of The Merchant of Venice with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust.^[16] She was in Heartbreak House (1964) at Sydney's Old Tote Theatre.^[17]

In the 1960s, after relocating to Orange, Steinbeck worked in amateur theatricals in the area.^[7]

Steinbeck was married to her first husband, Robert Aubrey, a journalist, from 7 July 1934 until their divorce in 1949. They had a daughter, Janice Claire, born in 1939.^[18][19][1]

Steinbeck then married company manager and engineer, Brian Dudley Nicholson in 1951.

Steinbeck lost a brother and a cousin during World War II; her brother was a POW and died in 1945, while her cousin was reported dead in 1944.^[20]

Although Steinbeck retired from acting in 1966, she accompanied her husband to Orange, New South Wales, to become a teacher of the arts, running her own drama school and authoring a book titled On Stage: A Practical Guide to the Actor's Craft.^[21]

Steinbeck died of cancer on 20 July 1982, aged 68.

• Muriel Steinbeck at IMDb
• Muriel Steinbeck Australian theatre credits at AusStage
• Muriel Steinbeck at the National Film and Sound Archive
• Sally O'Neill, 'Steinbeck, Muriel Myee (1913–1982)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/steinbeck-muriel-myee-15546/text26758, published first in hardcopy 2012, accessed online 30 April 2018.