Geraldine Sherman (born Geraldine Judith Schoenmann)^{[citation needed]} 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.^[1][2][3][4]

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Sherman was born in Staines, Middlesex. Her parents were refugees from Czechoslovakia.^[5] Her father Kurt Wilhelm Schoenmann was born in Teplice 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.^[6][7][8]

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.

— I was on the road to make-believe – Cassandra Jardine, The Telegraph, 16 June 2004

Notes:

When It's Over, by Geraldine Sherman and Eduardo Machado:

Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut: playreading 1985–1986, workshop 1986–1987^[57]

Finborough Theatre, London, 23 October – 16 November 1991^[58][59]

Thin Ice, 1995 film^[60]

Dena Hammerstein worked as a volunteer in New York City hospitals for over 15 years, and in 2003 received the United Hospital Funds New Leadership Group's Humanitarian Award.^[4] She is Founder of Only Make Believe, a non-profit organisation that creates and performs interactive theatre for children in hospitals and care facilities, inspired by her early work as an actress in the UK touring special-needs schools.^[78][79]

Her greatest pride is reserved for the charity, "Only Make Believe", which she founded with the idea of letting the theatre help institutionalised children as it had once helped her. At first, she had thought of taking sick children to the theatre, but it was such a problem getting them there that they were too exhausted to enjoy the shows.

Instead, she has brought the theatre to the children. The actors arrive with a large dressing-up trunk to rehearse a play in hospital using a script by Dena and children as performers.

— I was on the road to make-believe – Cassandra Jardine, The Telegraph, 16 June 2004

In 1970, a choreographer friend invited her to holiday in New York where she met Jamie Hammerstein.^[2]

Married theatre director James Hammerstein who directed her in Butley, and has one son Simon Hammerstein (born 1977).^[3]