[This is the ninth in an occasional series describing
British artistes who achieved fame on the stage or in the movies.]
I have not described any female artistes in this series and this
piece features two, one a much-loved character actress and the other a very
successful star of drama and musical comedy.
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| Margaret Rutherford |
Margaret Rutherford
(1892-1972) had a most unfortunate upbringing. Ten years before she was born,
her father William Benn (a brother of Tony Benn’s grandfather) in a fit of
madness murdered his own clergyman father by bludgeoning him with a Spode chamber-pot.
Benn was sent to Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane but was released,
supposedly cured, after 7 years changing his name to Rutherford. His second
wife, Margaret’s mother, settled in India, but when Margaret was 3, her mother,
who also suffered from depression, hanged herself from a tree and later William
Benn was readmitted to Broadmoor. Margaret was brought up by a kind aunt in
England but her own subsequent eccentricity may have been at least partly
congenital.
After a conventional middle class education in Wimbledon and
at boarding school in Sussex, Margaret became an elocution teacher; it was not
until she was 33 in 1925 that she became an actress, joining the Old Vic drama
school. She never aspired to be other than a character actress and she found
work in many of the ephemeral comedies of the period. As a critic very unkindly
put it, she had “the ugliest old ragbag of a face you ever saw”, with quivering
jowls, a jutting chin and a bull-dog expression. Yet her face was undoubtedly
her fortune; nobody ever forgot a Margaret Rutherford performance.
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| Rutherford as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit |
The critics first took notice of her as Miss Prism in a 1939
West End production of Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Earnest (later a movie) but she made her stage
breakthrough in 1941, playing the bumbling medium Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s
supernatural fantasy Blithe Spirit, and
also playing the same role in the 1945 movie directed by David Lean.
Rutherford’s talents as a comic actress on stage and screen were never to be
seen to better effect.
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| Rutherford, Grenfell and Sim |
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| As Miss Prism |
One of her most memorable roles was as the headmistress Miss
Whitfield in the 1950 comedy The Happiest
Days of your Life about the chaotic wartime billeting of a boys school on a
girls school, with Rutherford playing opposite hilarious Alistair Sim and Joyce
Grenfell. She became a familiar and welcome appearance in the comedy movies of
the time with Peter Sellers, Norman Wisdom and Frankie Howard. She did nor
forsake the stage and played in Congreve and Sheridan. She was a natural choice
for Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and
made 4 entertaining films in that role. Her high spot was winning a Best
Supporting Actress Oscar in 1963 for her part as the dotty Duchess of Brighton
in the star-studded The VIPs.
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| As Miss Marple |
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| As The Duchess of Brighton in The VIPs |
By the mid-60s her powers were
failing as Alzheimer’s took its toll. She died in 1972 with her devoted, if
probably bi-sexual husband, actor Stringer Davis, by her side. They had unofficially
adopted in the 1950s a young writer Gordon Langley Hall who reappeared after
gender realignment surgery as Dawn Langley Simmons, a biographer of this odd
but much cherished personality.
Anna Neagle (1904-86)
was the epitome of glamorous elegance and was a leading star in Britain for
some 25 years from 1931.
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| Anna Neagle in 1932 |
Anna Neagle was the daughter of Herbert Robertson, a
Scottish sea captain and the Irish Florence Neagle. Born in Forest Gate, London, she was educated
in Glasgow and then St Albans; she entered showbiz as a chorus girl in a C B
Cochran’s review aged 14.
Her career really took off when she played opposite
supremely sophisticated and charming Jack Buchanan in the hugely successful Stand up and Sing in 1931. She came to concentrate on the light dramas and
musicals of the period, including some historical dramas. Typical was Neagle’s
role in Nell Gwynn, the 1934 tale of
Charles II’s mistress, which prompted no less than Graham Greene to exclaim; “I
have seen few things more attractive than Miss Neagle in breeches” – which
speaks volumes of the provinciality of 1930s Britain! Neagle won golden
opinions portraying the title role in Victoria
the Great in 1937, soon to be followed by English heroines Florence Nightingale,
Edith Cavell and Amy Johnson.
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| As Nell Gwynn |
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| "Regal Neagle" as Queen Victoria |
Neagle first lived with and married in 1943 the leading film
producer and director Herbert Wilcox who made almost all her films. They
latterly resided in some style on grand Park Lane in the 1940s. Neagle had been
a great war-time favourite but in the early post-war era delivered a stunningly
popular and successful series of films partnered with handsome Michael Wilding
(he was Liz Taylor’s 2nd husband for 5 years). These musical and
melodramatic confections included Piccadilly
Incident, the Courtneys of Curzon
Street, Spring in Park Lane and
Maytime in Mayfair. Neagle and Wilding were hailed as “the greatest team in
British films” and Neagle was for 4 years voted the most popular British
actress.
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| Neagle and Wilding |
Her zenith was however short-lived; film fashions were
changing and her audience gradually deserted her. A few disappointing
productions saw her retire from movies in 1956. She and her husband backed
singer Frankie Vaughan in 3 films but they never made it and Wilcox was
declared bankrupt in 1964. Astonishingly Anna Neagle then made a dazzling stage
comeback in the role of Lady Hardwell in the musical comedy Charlie Girl, co-starring with singer
Joe Brown, which ran for 6 years in the London West End from 1965 to 1971, a
record for a British show.
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| Neagle in Charlie Girl |
Old troupers are irrepressible and Neagle played cameo roles
in panto right up to the year she died in 1986. She had enjoyed a glitteringly brilliant
career.
SMD
9.06.14
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014
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