SHE was the First Lady of Bermudian theatre. She was also, in very many ways, Bermuda's First Lady, period.

In an island that's never wanted for any number of counterfeit grande dames, Elsbeth Gibson was the genuine article. She was the embodiment of grace, intelligence and dignity, the pluperfect lady who other women admired and men could not help but be entranced by.

Although she was a consummate actress, her stately demeanour was never an act. Her inborn poise simply never required any artifice to enhance it.

When she died at 87 last weekend, Elsbeth Gibson had all but exhausted the honours her adopted home could bestow on her. However, those who knew her best also know they owe her debts that could never be fully discharged.

With an unerring eye for innate talent, she was a distaff and far more benign Henry Higgins. She repeatedly transformed shop girls into models, bartenders into singers and shy students into actors. A whole generation of Bermudian performers came to prominence under her tutelage.

She never claimed any special powers when it came to her talent-spotting abilities. But the evidence would suggest it was more than just inspired guesswork. It constituted a type of canny applied psychology, an ability to identify latent talents those who possessed them were often unaware they had.

Unstinting with her encouragement, generous with both her time and own gifts, she toiled assiduously to develop and refine human raw material. Sculptor-like, Elsbeth chipped and chiselled and polished away until the stunning form, lines and contours of ability emerged from dull stone she had started with.

Even a partial list of those who benefited from her teaching reads like a Roll Call of Bermuda's performing arts greats ? Gene Steede, June Caisey, John White, Pinky Steede, the estimable Gavin Wilson.

She and her late husband Don were at various times described as Bermuda's Lunt and Fontanne, its Olivier and Leigh, its Cronyn and Tandy.

A theatrical couple possessed of flair, ?lan and great good humour, such comparisons were probably inevitable. But the Gibsons found them both invidious and more than a little ludicrous. They never pretended to be anything other than who they were, Don and Elsbeth ? true originals. And that originality, combined with their own wide-ranging theatrical talents, made them? entirely without peer in Bermuda.

No professional actors are averse to the applause they receive on stage. Off stage, it's a different matter. Elsbeth and Don regarded the lionisation and fawning they frequently encountered as an occupational hazard to be endured with good grace rather than enjoyed. They were both professionals and that professionalism entailed all their energies went into honing their work, not careless pleasure-seeking on Bermuda's non-stop social carousel. Neither of them ever succumbed to the sin of pride. This was not false modesty on either of their parts. In theatrical circles, vanity and posturing tend to be the exclusive domain of the amateur.

Theirs was a remarkable partnership, both off-stage and on. Where she was all dignity and grace, he was impetuous and a professional rule-breaker. Edmund Burke once famously distinguished between the Beautiful and the Sublime. The Beautiful was Elsbeth ? according to Burke's definition shapely, harmonious and pleasing. The Sublime, irregular, jagged and awe-inspiring, rather like a sudden lightning storm over the Great Sound on a clear summer day, was Don. But their differences proved complementary. The Gibsons' was one of the happiest and longest-lived marriages imaginable.

From the time she and Don arrived in Bermuda for what was meant to be a six-week stint at the Darrell's Island film studio in 1954, these theatrical gypsies knew they had finally found a home.

Until Don's death 18 years ago, they worked together habitually ? at the old Bermudiana Theatre, on the Gulfstream (later Holiday Island) Review that toured hotels during the tourism industry's , on shows they staged under the banner of their own DonEl Productions. They were instrumental in turning the Harvard Hasty Pudding Club's annual productions here into a spring institution that returns to the island as reliably as the Longtails. They also midwived visits by Hal Holbrook, who staged his bravura one-manshow here under their aegis and Diana Douglas, whose critically heralded play was produced by Elsbeth.

Their enduring friendship with two-time Academy Award winning production designer Gene Callahan, another veteran of the Darrell's Island film studio, led to Columbia Pictures coming to the island in 1979 to film sequences for the James Cann-Marsha Mason romantic comedy here. The Neil Simon film, a major box-office success, showed the island at the peak of its tourism idyll, unspoilt and restful, and probably did more to promote the island's chief industry than the budget of the Tourism Ministry that year.

When Don died, Elsbeth lost her life partner but never her will to live or keep on working. She continued organising fashion shows for both department stores and the Department of Tourism and at age 80 appeared on stage alongside Danjou Anderson in a fine and touching production of, her theatrical swansong. Until the final weeks of her life could be found leading tour groups around the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, embellishing her set-piece narrative with colourful vignettes from Bermudian history.

Elsbeth, born in Washington State and a graduate of the fine theatre school at its university, had been a member of a repertoire company at the Playhouse Theatre in Erie, Pennsylvannia and toiled in summer stock in both the US and Canada.

As an actress, Elsbeth's extraordinarily animated features were her chief tools. Her eyes were simultaneously discerning, caressing and as perpetually delighted as a child's on Christmas morning. Her trademark voice was oak-aged ? deep, sensual and smoky. Think Lauren Bacall by way of Marlene Dietrich.

And her versatility was easily a match for her apparent indefatigability.

From the time she graduated in 1939 until 1948, she appeared in dozens of stage productions. She refined her skills as a tragedienne in and , as a comedienne in and and as a classical actress in such Shakespearean fare as and . She also played on early television productions in New York (including the science fiction cult classic and, even by the dubious standards of earlier network TV an improbably bizarre hybrid of situation comedy and soap operatics).

Most happily in 1948 she and new husband Don began a three-year association with Atlanta's Penthouse Theatre, then perhaps the most celebrated regional playhouses in the United States. They worked there in a similar capacity to old-fashioned theatrical actor/managers, appearing on stage while simultaneously handling all manner of back-stage business ranging from set construction to drying out alcoholic actors.

In 1949, the mercurial but troubled Sarah Churchill was appearing in a play at the Penthouse. The daughter of Britain's wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, her undoubted ability was all too often eclipsed by her distinguished pedigree in the public eye. She bitterly resented being known chiefly as her father's daughter and grew increasingly volatile and impulsive. She was also prone to the same Black Dog-depressions that so troubled Churchill. Elsbeth and Don soon realised they were not just Sarah's employers but virtually acting for the lonely woman.

During the run of the play Sarah spontaneously decided to elope. She travelled to Sea Island, Georgia, then as now a getaway for the rich and famous, to marry society photographer and future TV director Anthony Beauchamp, an equally fickle soul who committed suicide in 1957.

The actress confided her plans in Elsbeth and swore her to secrecy. Elsbeth arranged for Sarah's understudy to take her part in the play for that night. Later that evening, as Sarah and her new husband were cutting their wedding cake at the palatial home of resort founder Bill Jones, Sr., the telephone rang at the Gibsons' far more modest accommodations.

Elsbeth answered. She found herself talking to one of the most famous voices in the world.

"Young lady, I demand you tell me where my daughter is," roared Winston Churchill, alerted to a marriage he strongly disapproved of. Elsbeth recalled that he spoke with the same leonine ferocity he had once reserved for Hitler in his wartime radio broadcasts.

"I can't do that, sir," said Elsbeth. "I'm sorry."

"Why ever not?"

"Sir, during the war didn't you ever have to keep secrets? Weren't there things you simply could not tell to other people?"

There was a pause at the other end of the transatlantic line.

"Well, that's the position I find myself in now. I cannot tell you where Sarah is. But I can tell you she is safe and healthy will be back in Atlanta tomorrow."

Again there was pin-drop silence at the other end of the line, punctuated only by the sound of the once-and-future Prime Minister drawing deeply on his cigar. "I don't like at all what you have just said to me but I tremendously admire your courage in saying it," said Winston Churchill. "Good night to you, Madam."

To have gone from "young lady" to "Madam" in the course of a brief and very uncomfortable conversation with Churchill was something Elsbeth would never forgot. She considered standing up to the cantankerous British Lion to be one of the finest performances she ever gave.

In January, 1950 the Gibsons staged a production of at The Playhouse. Film and theatre legend Boris Karloff starred, reprising a role he had earlier played on Broadway and in Los Angeles.

Although best known for his uncanny characterisations as The Mummy, Fu Manchu and, most famously, the Frankenstein monster, the private Karloff was the polar opposite to the heavies he played on screen. A gentle man who preferred cricket, gardening and the company of his terriers to Hollywood carousing, he also loved children and deeply missed the company of his daughter Sara, then aged 11, while on the road.

At this stage in his career, Karloff ? who had terrified one generation with his gruesome roles - was enchanting a new one. He had started what would turn into a 12-year stint reading children's stories daily on the Readers' Digest radio programme and just months after his Atlanta engagement would realise one of his most celebrated successes playing the dual role of Mr. Darling/Captain Hook opposite Jean Arthur's title character in a now legendary Broadway production of .

The Gibsons were taken with Karloff and he often spent time at their Atlanta home during his Penthouse engagement, regaling them with Hollywood war-stories told with his Martini-dry British wit.

One night the Gibsons' young daughter, Laurie, wandered into the living room while Karloff was holding forth and announced she had a nightmare and could not sleep.

Elsbeth and Karloff rose to their feet simultaneously and the actor immediately began comforting the child. He turned to his hosts and asked in his endearing, lisping voice: "Would it be alright if I took Laurie back to bed and read her a bedtime story to get her off to sleep."

"Would that be all right, Laurie," asked Elsbeth, "if Uncle Boris took you back to bed?"

The child nodded. Karloff took her by the hand and led her back to her bedroom.

"Dear God in heaven, Elsbeth, do you realise what you've just done?" asked Don in wonderment.

Elsbeth shook her head, no.

"She just woke up from a nightmare. Now you've got the Frankenstein monster babysitting our little daughter!"

"That all men should be such monsters," retorted Elsbeth, who noticed Don had yet to rise from his chair.

By way of summary, in Elsbeth Gibson Bermuda was blessed with a poised and gracious woman, with no interests other than professionalism and no vices, as best as I can ascertain, except an unfailing ability for causing her many admirers to produce tributes quite as fulsome as this one. But that's forgivable. For the example of her life could serve as an object lesson to any would-be performer on how to best go about being a bravura actor, a bravura director and, above all, a bravura human being.

And in death, which she neither feared nor shrank from, she will finally be reunited with her beloved Don. When she is buried tomorrow afternoon at St. Paul's Church, Paget no grave in Bermuda shall clip in it a pair so famous.