Hilton twins

On January 6, 1969 the twins were found dead in their home due to the Hong Kong Flu. She was knighted and became a Dame. Their tour manager failed to pick them up and they had to take a job at a grocery store. She was married to Peter Fleming an explorer and writer and brother of Ian Fleming. The Hiltons' last public appearance was at a drive-in movie theater in Charlotte, North Carolina. She generally played a genteel and/or repressed Englishwoman, though she proved in many stage productions to be a talented comedienne. In the 1950 they tried Hollywood again and starred in a movie Chained for Life. Other films include The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).

Eventually the sisters settled in Miami and kept a hamburger stand called the Hilton Sisters' Snack Bar. She made relatively few films, of which Brief Encounter is by far the best known. In 1932 the twins appeared as themselves in the movie Freaks. By 1931, she was starring as Ophelia in a New York production of Hamlet. As if to compensate for their deprived past, they had numerous affairs, failed attempts to get a marriage license and couple of short marriages. Her stage début was in Major Barbara in 1928. Daisy dyed her hair blonde and they began to wear different outfits so they could be told apart. She was born in Richmond, Surrey, and trained in acting at RADA.

They left the sideshows and went into vaudeville as "The Hilton Sisters' Revue". Dame Celia Johnson (1908-1982) was an English actress, famous for her role in the 1945 film, Brief Encounter, opposite Trevor Howard. In 1931 the sisters gathered enough courage to sue their "managers", gaining $100.000 in damages - and independence. They lived in a mansion in San Antonio, Texas until the early 1930s. They kept the twins from public view for a while and trained them in jazz music.

When Mary died in Birmingham, Alabama, her daughter and her husband took over. Their controllers kept all the money the sisters earned. In the true sideshow manner, their performance was accompanied with a dubious "history". Mary Hilton dragged them to a tour through Germany, Australia and to the USA.

The Hilton sisters toured first in England at the age of three as "the United Twins". They trained them in singing and dancing. According to the sisters' own autobiography, Mary Hilton, her husband and daughter kept the twins in strict control with physical abuse; they had to call her "Auntie Lou" and her current husband "Sir". Skinner's boss Mary Hilton, who helped in childbirth, apparently saw commercial prospects in them, effectively bought them from their mother and took them under her care.

The sisters were born conjoined in hips and buttocks; they shared blood circulation and were fused at the pelvis but shared no major organs. Their mother was a single barmaid named Kate Skinner. Daisy and Violet Hilton were born in Brighton, England on February 5, 1908. The Hilton twins were a pair of conjoined twins who toured in the US sideshow and vaudeville circuit in the 1930's.