Margaret Rutherford

Dame Margaret Rutherford DBE
Born	Margaret Taylor Rutherford-Benn (1892-05-11)11 May 1892 Balham, London, England
Died	22 May 1972(1972-05-22) (aged 80) Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, England
Resting place	St. James's Church, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1925–67
Spouse	Stringer Davis ​ (m. 1945)​
Children	Dawn Langley Simmons (adopted)

Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford, DBE (11 May 1892 – 22 May 1972) was an English actress of stage, television and film.

She came to national attention following World War II in the film adaptations of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. She won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for her role as the Duchess of Brighton in The V.I.P.s (1963). In the early 1960s, she starred as Agatha Christie's character Miss Marple in a series of four George Pollock films. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1961 and a Dame Commander (DBE) in 1967.

Margaret Rutherford's early home, her aunt Bessie's house in Wimbledon, 1895–1920

Early life

Rutherford's early life was overshadowed by tragedies involving both of her parents. Her father, journalist and poet William Rutherford Benn, married Florence Nicholson on 16 December 1882 in Wandsworth, South London. One month after the marriage, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum. Released to travel under his family's supervision, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational Church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamber pot, before slashing his own throat with a pocket knife at an inn in Matlock, Derbyshire on 4 March 1883.

Following the inquest, William Benn was certified insane and removed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Seven years later, on 26 July 1890, he was discharged from Broadmoor and reunited with his wife. He legally dropped his surname.

Margaret Taylor Rutherford, the only child of William and Florence, was born in 1892 in Balham, South London. Margaret's uncle, Sir John Benn, 1st Baronet, was a politician, and her first cousin once removed was the Labour politician Tony Benn. Hoping to start a new life far from the scene of their recent troubles, the Rutherfords emigrated to Madras, India, but Margaret was returned to Britain when she was three years old to live with her aunt Bessie Nicholson in Wimbledon, South London, after her pregnant mother hanged herself from a tree.

Young Margaret had been told that her father died of a broken heart soon afterward. When she was 12 years old, she was shocked to learn that her father had actually been readmitted to Broadmoor Hospital in 1903, where he remained under care until his death on 4 August 1921. Her parents' mental afflictions gave rise to a fear that she might succumb to similar maladies, a fear which haunted her for the rest of her life. She suffered intermittent bouts of depression and anxiety.

Margaret Rutherford was educated at Wimbledon High School (where a theatre space, the Rutherford Centre, is now named after her) and, from the age of about 13, at Raven's Croft School, a boarding school in Sutton Avenue, Seaford. While she was there, she developed an interest in the theatre and performed in amateur dramatics. After she left school, her aunt paid for her to have private acting lessons. When her aunt died, she left a legacy that allowed Rutherford to secure entry to the Old Vic School. In her autobiography, Rutherford called her Aunt Bessie her "adoptive mother and one of the saints of the world".

Stage career

Rutherford, a talented pianist who first found work as a piano teacher and a teacher of elocution, developed an acting career relatively late, only making her stage debut in 1925, aged 33, at the Old Vic. As her "spaniel jowls" and bulky frame made the part of a romantic heroine impossible casting, she soon established her name in comedy, appearing in many of the most successful British plays and films. "I never intended to play for laughs. I am always surprised that the audience thinks me funny at all", Rutherford wrote in her autobiography. Rutherford made her first appearance in London's West End in 1933, but her talent was not recognised by the critics until her performance as Miss Prism in John Gielgud's production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Globe Theatre in 1939.

In 1941 Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit opened on the London stage at the Piccadilly Theatre, with Coward directing. Rutherford received rave reviews from audiences and critics alike for her lusty portrayal of the bumbling medium Madame Arcati, a role which Coward had envisaged for her. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once said of her performances: "The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone."

Another theatrical success during the war years included her part as the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca at the Queen's Theatre in 1940. Her post-war theatre credits included Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest again at the Haymarket Theatre in 1946 and Lady Bracknell when the same play transferred to New York City in 1947. She played an officious headmistress in The Happiest Days of Your Life at the Apollo Theatre in 1948 and classical roles such as Madame Desmortes in Ring Round the Moon (Globe Theatre, 1950), Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World (Lyric Hammersmith, 1953 and Saville Theatre, 1956) and Mrs. Candour in The School for Scandal (Haymarket Theatre, 1962). Her final stage performance came in 1966 when she played Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals at the Haymarket Theatre, alongside Sir Ralph Richardson. Her declining health meant she had to give up the role after a few weeks.

Film career

Although she made her film debut in 1936, it was Rutherford's turn as Madame Arcati in David Lean's film of Blithe Spirit (1945) that established her in films. Her jaunty performance, cycling about the Kent countryside, head held high, back straight, and cape fluttering behind her, established the model for portraying that role thereafter. She was Nurse Carey in Miranda (1948) and the sprightly Medieval expert Professor Hatton-Jones in Passport to Pimlico (1949), one of the Ealing Comedies. She reprised her stage roles of the headmistress alongside Alastair Sim in The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) and Miss Prism in Anthony Asquith's film adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest (1952).

More comedies followed, including Castle in the Air (1952) with David Tomlinson, Trouble in Store (1953), with Norman Wisdom, The Runaway Bus (1954) with Frankie Howerd and An Alligator Named Daisy (1955) with Donald Sinden and Diana Dors. Rutherford then worked with Norman Wisdom again in Just My Luck (1957) and co-starred in The Smallest Show on Earth with Virginia McKenna, Peter Sellers and Leslie Phillips (both 1957). She featured, alongside Ian Carmichael and Peter Sellers, in the Boulting Brothers satire I'm All Right Jack (1959).

In the early 1960s, she appeared as Miss Jane Marple in a series of four George Pollock films loosely based on the novels of Agatha Christie. The films depicted Marple as a colourful character, respectable but bossy and eccentric. Authors Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker in their book Reflecting on Miss Marple (1991) complained that the emphasis on the "dotty element in the character" missed entirely "the quietness and sharpness" that was admired in the novels. The actress, then aged in her 70s, insisted on wearing her own clothes for the part and having her husband appear alongside her. In 1963 Christie dedicated her novel The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side "To Margaret Rutherford in admiration", though the novelist too was critical of the films for diverging from her original plots and playing dramatic scenes for laughs. Rutherford reprised the role of Miss Marple in a very brief, uncredited cameo in the 1965 film The Alphabet Murders.

Rutherford played the absent-minded, impoverished, pill-popping Duchess of Brighton, the only comedy relief, in The V.I.P.s (1963), from a screenplay by Terence Rattigan. The film features a star-studded cast led by Maggie Smith, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. For her performance, she won an Academy Award and Golden Globe Awards for Best Supporting Actress. At the time she set a record for the oldest woman and last born in the nineteenth century to win an Oscar.

She appeared as Mistress Quickly in Orson Welles' film Chimes at Midnight (1965) and was directed by Charlie Chaplin in A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, which was one of her final films. She started work on The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970), but illness caused her to be replaced by Fay Compton.

Personal life

In 1945, Rutherford, fifty-three, married character actor Stringer Davis, forty-six, after a courtship that lasted for 15 years. Davis' mother reportedly considered Rutherford an unsuitable match for her son, and their wedding was postponed until after Mrs. Davis had died. Subsequently, the couple appeared in many productions together. Davis adored Rutherford, with one friend noting: "For him she was not only a great talent but, above all, a beauty." The actor and former serviceman rarely left his wife's side, serving Rutherford as private secretary and general dogsbody. More importantly, he nursed and comforted her through periodic debilitating depressions. These illnesses, sometimes involving stays in mental hospitals and electric shock treatment, were kept hidden from the press during Rutherford's lifetime.

In the 1950s, Rutherford and Davis unofficially adopted the writer Gordon Langley Hall, then in his twenties. Hall later had sex reassignment surgery and became Dawn Langley Simmons, under which name she wrote a biography of Rutherford in 1983.

Death

Rutherford suffered from Alzheimer's disease at the end of her life and was unable to work. Davis cared for his wife at their Buckinghamshire home until her death on 22 May 1972, aged 80. Many of Britain's top actors, including Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Dame Flora Robson and Joyce Grenfell, attended a memorial Service of Thanksgiving at the Actors' Church, St. Paul's, Covent Garden, on 21 July 1972, where 90-year-old Dame Sybil Thorndike praised her friend's enormous talent and recalled that Rutherford had "never said anything horrid about anyone".

Rutherford and Davis (who died in 1973) are interred at the graveyard of St. James's Church, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. "A Blithe Spirit" is inscribed on the base of Margaret Rutherford's memorial stone, a reference to the Noël Coward play that helped to make her name.

Margaret Rutherford honour plaque in London

Theatre performances

• A student at the Old Vic Theatre School, playing walk-ons and small parts in various shows, 1925–26
• Understudy for Mabel Terry-Lewis at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1928
• A season with the English Repertory Players at the Grand Theatre, Fulham, 1929
• Little Theatre, Epsom, 1930
• A season in rep at the Oxford Playhouse, 1930–31
• A season in rep in Croydon, 1931
• A season with the Greater London Players, 1932
• Mrs. Read in Wild Justice at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1933
• Birthday (understudy to Jean Cadell and Muriel Aked), at the Cambridge Theatre, 1934
• Aline Solness in The Master Builder at the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, 1934
• Lady Nancy in Hervey House at His Majesty's Theatre, 1935
• Miss Flower in Short Story at the Queen's Theatre, 1935
• Mrs. Palmai in Farewell Performance at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1936
• Aunt Bella in Tavern in the Town at the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, 1937
• Emily Deveral in Up the Garden Path at the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, 1937
• The Mother in The Melody That Got Lost at the Phoenix Theatre, 1938
• Bijou Furze in Spring Meeting at the Ambassadors Theatre, 1938
• Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Globe Theatre, 1939
• Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca at the Queen's Theatre, 1940
• Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit at the Piccadilly Theatre, 1941
• ENSA tour of France and Belgium, 1944
• Queen of Hearts and White Queen in Alice in Wonderland at the Palace Theatre, 1944
• Lady Charlotte Fayre in Perchance to Dream at the London Hippodrome, 1945
• Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, 1946
• Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Royale Theatre, New York, 1947
• Evelyn Whitchurch in The Happiest Days of Your Life at the Apollo Theatre, 1948
• Madame Desmortes in Ring Round the Moon at the Globe Theatre, 1950
• The title role in Miss Hargreaves at the Royal Court Theatre and New Theatre, 1952
• Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1953
• White Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass at the Prince's Theatre, 1954
• Duchess of Pont-au-Bronc in Time Remembered at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith and New Theatre, 1954
• Mirabelle Petersham in A Likely Tale at the Globe Theatre, 1956
• Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World at the Saville Theatre, 1956
• Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest on UK tour (Dublin, Limerick, Belfast, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Eastbourne and Bournemouth), 1957
• The Happiest Days of Your Life and Time Remembered on tour of Australia, 1957
• Minerva Goody (Povis) in Farewell, Farewell Eugene at the Garrick Theatre, 1959
• Minerva Goody (Povis) in Farewell, Farewell Eugene at the Helen Hayes Theatre, New York, 1960
• Bijou Furze in Dazzling Prospect at the Globe Theatre, 1961
• The Marquise in Our Little Life at the Manoel Theatre in Valletta, Malta and the Pembroke Theatre, Croydon, 1961
• Mrs. Candour in The School for Scandal at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, 1962
• Mrs. Laura Partridge in The Solid Gold Cadillac at the Saville Theatre, 1965
• Mrs. Heidelberg in The Clandestine Marriage at the Chichester Festival Theatre, 1966
• Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, 1966

Filmography

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1936	Troubled Waters	Bit role	film debut, uncredited
1936	Dusty Ermine	Evelyn Summers aka Miss Butterby
1936	Talk of the Devil	Housekeeper
1937	Beauty and the Barge	Mrs. Baldwin
1937	Big Fella	Nanny	uncredited
1937	Catch as Catch Can	Maggie Carberry
1937	Missing, Believed Married	Lady Parke
1941	Spring Meeting	Aunt Bijou
1941	Quiet Wedding	Magistrate
1943	Yellow Canary	Mrs. Towcester
1943	The Demi-Paradise	Rowena Ventnor
1944	English Without Tears	Lady Christabel Beauclerk
1945	Blithe Spirit	Madame Arcati
1947	While the Sun Shines	Dr Winifred Frye
1947	Meet Me at Dawn	Madame Vernore
1948	Miranda	Nurse Carey
1949	Passport to Pimlico	Professor Hatton-Jones
1950	The Happiest Days of Your Life	Muriel Whitchurch
1950	Her Favourite Husband	Mrs. Dotherington
1951	The Magic Box	Lady Pond
1952	Curtain Up	Catherine Beckwith / Jeremy St. Claire
1952	The Importance of Being Earnest	Miss Letitia Prism
1952	Castle in the Air	Miss Nicholson
1952	Miss Robin Hood	Miss Honey
1953	Innocents in Paris	Gwladys Inglott
1953	Trouble in Store	Miss Bacon
1954	The Runaway Bus	Miss Cynthia Beeston
1954	Mad About Men	Nurse Carey
1954	Aunt Clara	Clara Hilton
1955	An Alligator Named Daisy	Prudence Croquet
1957	The Smallest Show on Earth	Mrs. Fazackalee
1957	Just My Luck	Mrs. Dooley
1959	I'm All Right Jack	Aunt Dolly
1961	On the Double	Lady Vivian
1961	Murder, She Said	Miss Jane Marple
1962	Zero One (TV)	Mrs Pendenny	episode "The Liar"
1963	The Mouse on the Moon	Grand Duchess Gloriana XIII
1963	Murder at the Gallop	Miss Jane Marple
1963	The V.I.P.s	The Duchess of Brighton	Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture Laurel Award for Top Female Supporting Performance National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress
1964	Murder Most Foul	Miss Jane Marple
1964	Murder Ahoy!
1965	Chimes at Midnight	Mistress Quickly
1965	The Alphabet Murders	Miss Jane Marple	uncredited cameo
1967	A Countess from Hong Kong	Miss Gaulswallow
1967	Arabella	Princess Ilaria
1967	The Wacky World of Mother Goose	Mother Goose	voice

Legacy

For One Night Only: Margaret Rutherford. Margaret Rutherford (Timothy Spall in drag) tells her life story in cabaret form before an audience. Without Walls TV Series (UK) 5 October 1993.

Recordings

The English PEN International Centre included several readings of poems by Rutherford on a list entitled Library of Recordings.pdf Archived 8 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine (1953). The works listed were:

• "A Charm Against the Toothache" by John Heath-Stubbs
• "O Country People" by John Hewett
• "Sedge-Warblers", "Women He Liked", "Haymaking", "Adlestrop", "Will You Come?" and "Lights Out" by Edward Thomas

78s and singles

• All's Going Well / Nymphs and Shepherds (1953) (with Frankie Howerd): Philips Records PB214

Further reading

• Alistair, Rupert (2018). "Margaret Rutherford". The Name Below the Title : 65 Classic Movie Character Actors from Hollywood's Golden Age (softcover) (First ed.). Great Britain: Independently published. pp. 229–233. ISBN 978-1-7200-3837-5.
• Merriman, Andy (2009). Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners (hardcover) (First ed.). London: Aurum Press. ISBN 978-1-84513-445-7.
• Simmons, Dawn Langley (1983). Margaret Rutherford: A Blithe Spirit (hardcover) (First ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-057479-3.
• Rutherford, Margaret (1972). Margaret Rutherford: An Autobiography (hardcover). As told to Gwen Robyns (First ed.). London: W. H. Allen.
• Keown, Eric (1956). Margaret Rutherford (hardcover). Theatre World Monograph No. 7 (First ed.). London: Rockliff.

External links

• Margaret Rutherford at IMDb
• Margaret Rutherford at the Internet Broadway Database
• Oxford National Dictionary of Biography profile
• Performances in Theatre Archive, University of Bristol
• Margaret Rutherford at the BFI's Screenonline
• "Famous Rutherfords"
• Portraits of Margaret Rutherford at the National Portrait Gallery