Geraldine Sherman

Geraldine Sherman (born Geraldine Judith Schoenmann) known as Dena Hammerstein, is a British actress and writer, and theatre producer. She was the third wife of James Hammerstein, and after his death became president/CEO of James Hammerstein Productions Ltd. Sherman was born in Staines, Middlesex. Her parents were refugees from Czechoslovakia. Her father Kurt Wilhelm Schoenmann was born in Teplitz in Bohemia in 1915. He married Edith Peller, later coming to Britain to escape Nazi persecution, but was interned in March 1940 because his nationality was Austrian. He was then transported to Australia on the infamous 1940 Dunera voyage, and held in Loveday and Tatura internment camps until 1942. Dena came from a bedsit in Ladbroke Grove, long before Notting Hill became fashionable. Her parents were Jewish refugees. When Dena – Geraldine Sherman – was born, her father was in an internment camp in Australia and her nervous mother sent her out of London to the safety of a Jewish orphanage in Shenfield, Essex. The kindly matron was her mother figure, so, when she was sent back to live with her parents at the age of 11, she was miserable. "All I wanted was to go back to the orphanage," she says. "I was embarrassed by my parents, by their broken English and their permanent refugee complex. I hadn't been brought up to think that every time the doorbell rang, it was the Gestapo." One happy memory from the orphanage to which she clung during the difficult years with her parents was of an outing to the theatre. "We were taken to see a frothy pink and white fantasy show," she remembers. "Afterwards, I was taken to the stage door and I didn't have my arm through the sleeve of my jacket, so it was hanging loose. When the star came out, she said: 'Would the little girl with only one arm please step forward?' I immediately put on a limp as well and, from that moment, I was on the road to make-believe." At the age of 17, she ran away to join a theatre group.