Born at
Ilford,
Essex, Phyllis Sellick started to play the piano by ear at the age of three and had her first music lesson on her fifth birthday. Four years later she won the
Daily Mirror's "Pip, Squeak and Wilfred" contest for young musicians and was awarded two years' private tuition with
Cuthbert Whitemore, subsequently winning an open scholarship to continue her study with him at the
Royal Academy of Music. She later studied with
Isidor Philipp in
Paris. She specialised in French and English music. She first met
Cyril Smith at a concert in the
Queen's Hall,
London. They married in 1937 and had two children, a son, Graham, who predeceased his mother, and a daughter, Claire. She and her husband performed together at
The Proms making many international
tours and
recordings as a duo. Composers such as
Ralph Vaughan Williams (''Introduction and Fugue 'For Phyllis and Cyril''') and
Lennox Berkeley (Concerto for Two Pianos, premiered at the Albert Hall in December 1948) wrote music specially for them. She and Smith were awarded
OBEs in 1971. After Smith's death in 1974, Sellick continued a long and successful career as a teacher at the
Royal College of Music, where her husband had taught. She continued to work into her 90s, despite her failing eyesight and loss of her playing ability in her left hand following an accident. In 2002 she appeared on the
BBC radio programme
Desert Island Discs. One of her choices was
Sergei Rachmaninoff's
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini to which she added "I would like Cyril to play it". Phyllis Sellick continued to work into her 10th decade. She died at age 95 in 2007 and was survived by her daughter, Claire Sellick, a photographer. ==References==