 An Oscar nominee while in her teens, as the pert maid in Gaslight (US, d. George Cukor, 1944), pushed from film to film by MGM without becoming a leading lady, it seems that her pouty looks and acid delivery always pointed towards character roles rather than romantic leads. She is the granddaughter of British Labour leader George Lansbury and daughter of actress Moyna MacGill who sent her to the Webber-Douglas school, then out of wartime England to America in 1940. And that is where most of her very long career, on screen, stage (she had a huge Tony-winning success as Mame, 1966) and TV (monotonously nominated for Emmys for Murder, She Wrote over the past two decades), has taken place, but there has been a minor stream of British films, the most notable of which are probably Death on the Nile (d. John Guillermin, 1978), as the outrageous novelist, Salome Otterbourne, and The Company of Wolves (d. Neil Jordan, 1984), as Granny. She was awarded a BAFTA Life Achievement award in 1991, and a CBE in 1994. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
|
FILM & TV CREDITS
