 Of the four lead actors in the first "official" Gainsborough melodrama, The Man in Grey (1943, d. Leslie Arliss), Margaret Lockwood (1916-1990) was the only one who was already a star, having previously played the female lead in the internationally successful The Lady Vanishes (1938, d. Alfred Hitchcock) for the same studio.
That said, it was undoubtedly the 1940s melodramas that established her reputation, starting with her performance as the wicked Hesther in The Man in Grey and reaching a peak with the even more amoral Lady Barbara Skelton in The Wicked Lady (1945, d. Leslie Arliss), thrilling audiences with her shameless pilfering of her best friend's husband before turning to gambling and highway robbery.
This last performance in particular created an indelible impression and catapulted her to the top - in 1945 and 1946 she was unarguably the most popular homegrown female star in British cinema.
Her range was also rather wider than her two best-known roles suggest, as she also played the doomed concert pianist in Love Story (1944, d. Arliss), the nervy, haunted companion in A Place of One's Own (1945, d. Bernard Knowles) and the music-hall star in I'll Be Your Sweetheart (1945, d. Val Guest), though Bedelia (1946, d. Lance Comfort) capitalised on her popular image as a villainess by casting her as a serial-killing bride.
But after the war her career declined surprisingly rapidly. A final Gainsborough melodrama, Jassy (1947, d. Knowles) failed to recapture the old magic, though it did at least give her an opportunity to show off a whole wardrobe of vivid costumes in glorious Technicolor. But her later filmography is resolutely undistinguished, and from the mid-1950s onwards she worked almost exclusively in television. Awarded the CBE in 1981, she died a virtual recluse a decade later.
Michael Brooke
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FILM & TV CREDITS
