Endearing Anna Neagle (1904-1986) was a leading star in British films for over 25 years from 1932 till the late 1950s. She provided glamour and sophistication to war-torn London audiences with her lightweight musicals, comedies and historical dramas. Almost all of her films were produced and directed by Herbert Wilcox, whom she married in 1943. British postcard by Real Photograph in the Picturegoer Series, no. 867a. Photo: Cannons. Overnight Favourite Anna Neagle was born Florence Marjorie Robertson in Forest Gate (near London), in 1904. She was the daughter of Herbert Robertson, a merchant navy captain, and his wife, the former Florence Neagle. Her brother was actor Stuart Robinson. She made her stage debut as a dancer in 1917. In 1925 she appeared in the chorus of André Charlot's revue Bubbly, and later also in C.B. Cochran's revues, where she understudied Jessie Matthews. Actor Jack Buchanan encouraged her to take on a featured role in the musical Stand Up and Sing (1931), and she began using the professional name of Anna Neagle (the surname being her mother's maiden name). The play was a huge success with a total run of 604 performances. Her big break came when film producer-director Herbert Wilcox caught the show purposely to consider Buchanan for his upcoming film. He was taken (and smitten) with Anna. Photographing extremely well, Neagle was a natural for the screen and she played her first starring film role opposite Jack Buchanan in the musical Goodnight Vienna (Herbert Wilcox, 1932). Neagle became an overnight favourite. Although the film cost a mere £23,000, it was a huge hit at the box office, profits from its Australian release alone being £150,000. After her starring role in The Flag Lieutenant (Henry Edwards, 1932), she worked exclusively under Wilcox's direction for all but one of her subsequent films, becoming one of Britain's biggest stars. She continued in the musical genre, co-starring with Fernand Gravey (aka Fernand Gravet) in Bitter Sweet (1933), the first film version of Noel Coward's tale of ill-fated lovers. British postcard by Real Photograph, London in the Picturegoer series, no. 867. Photo: Cannons. Critical Accolades Anna Neagle had her first major film success in the title role of Nell Gwynn (1934), as the woman who became the mistress of Charles II (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). In the United States, the Hays Office had Wilcox add a (historically false) scene featuring the two leads getting married and also a ´framing story´ resulting in an entirely different ending. Author Graham Greene said of Nell Gwynn: "I have seen few things more attractive than Miss Neagle in breeches". Two years later, she followed up with another real-life figure, Irish actress Peg Woffington in Peg of Old Drury (1936). Neagle and Wilcox then made the backstage musical Limelight (1936) and a circus trapeze fable The Three Maxims (1937). The latter film, with a script co-written by Herman J. Mankiewicz (who later co-wrote Citizen Kane), had Neagle performing her own high-wire acrobatics. Although now highly successful in films, Neagle continued to act on stage too. In 1934, she performed as Rosalind in As You Like It and Olivia in Twelfth Night, directed by Robert Atkins. She earned critical accolades in both productions, despite the fact that she had never before done any Shakespeare. British postcard by Real Photograph, London in the Picturegoer series, no. 672. Queen Victoria In 1937 Anna Neagle gave her most prestigious performance so far – as Queen Victoria in the successful historical drama Victoria the Great (1937), co-starring Anton Walbrook as Prince Albert. Victoria the Great was such an international success that it resulted in Neagle and Walbrook essaying their roles again in an all-Technicolor sequel entitled Sixty Glorious Years (1938), co-starring C. Aubrey Smith as the Duke of Wellington. While the first of these films was in release, Neagle returned to the London stage in the title role in Peter Pan. The two Queen Victoria biographies were successful enough to get Wilcox and Neagle a contract with RKO Radio Pictures, and they moved to Hollywood at the end of the 1930´s. Their first American film was Nurse Edith Cavell (1939). She essayed the role of the true-life nurse who was shot by the Germans in World War I for alleged spying. The film had a significant impact for audiences on the eve of war. In a turnabout from this serious drama, they followed with three musical comedies, all based on once-popular stage plays. The first was Irene (1940), co-starring Ray Milland. It included a Technicolor sequence, which featured Neagle singing the play's most famous song, Alice Blue Gown. British postcard by Real Photograph, no. 101. Photo: British & Dominions Films. Entertaining the Troops Anna Neagle followed this film with No, No, Nanette (1940) with Victor Mature, and Sunny (1941) with Ray Bolger. During the war Anna entertained the troops. Her final American film was Forever and a Day (1943), a tale of a London family house from 1804 to the 1940 blitz. This film boasts 80 performers (mostly British), including Ray Milland, C. Aubrey Smith, Claude Rains, Charles Laughton, and – among the few Americans – Buster Keaton. Wilcox directed the sequence featuring Neagle, Milland, Smith, and Rains, while other directors who worked on the film included René Clair, Edmund Goulding, Frank Lloyd, Victor Saville and Robert Stevenson. During the war the profits and salaries were given to war relief. After the war, prints were slated to be destroyed, so that no one could profit from them. However, this never occurred. British postcard by Real Photograph, London, no. 148. Undercover Agent Returning to England, Anna Neagle and Herbert Wilcox commenced with They Flew Alone (1942). Neagle added another real-life British heroines to her gallery, this time as aviatrix Amy Johnson. The film, released a year after the aviatrix’s death, was noted for inter-cutting the action with newsreel footage. They returned to filmmaking with the war-time espionage thriller The Yellow Canary (1943), co-starring Richard Greene and Margaret Rutherford. Neagle played a German-sympathiser (or that is what she seems to be at first) who is forced to go to Canada for her own safety. In reality, she's working as an undercover agent. After making this film, Neagle and Wilcox made their professional relationship a personal one as well when they married in 1943. In 1945 Neagle appeared on stage in Emma, a dramatization of Jane Austen's novel. That same year she was seen in the film I Live in Grosvenor Square, co-starring Rex Harrison. For seven straight years after WWII, she was voted top favourite English actress. British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W 418. Photo: Herbert Wilcox Production / British Lion. Publicity still for Spring in Park Lane (Herbert Wilcox, 1948) with Tom Walls and Michael Wilding. British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W 714. Photo: Herbert Wilcox Production / British Lion. Publicity still for Maytime in Mayfair (Herbert Wilcox, 1949) with Michael Wilding. The Greatest Team in British Films She wanted Harrison again for the lead in her next film, Piccadilly Incident (1946). He proved to be unavailable, so Wilcox cast Michael Wilding in the lead. Thus was born what film critic Godfrey Winn called "the greatest team in British films". The story – of a wife, presumed dead, returning to her (remarried) husband – bears a resemblance to the Irene Dunne-Cary Grant comedy My Favorite Wife. Piccadilly Incident was chosen as Picturegoer’s Best Film of 1947. Neagle and Wilding were reunited in The Courtneys of Curzon Street (1947), a period drama that became the year's top box-office attraction. The film featured Wilding as an upper-class dandy and Neagle as the maid he marries, only to have the two of them driven apart by Victorian society. The third pairing of Neagle and Wilding in the London films, as the series of films came to be called, was in Spring in Park Lane (1948), which depicted the romance between a millionaire’s niece and a valet. Spring in Park Lane was the 1949 Picturegoer winner for Best Film, Actor and Actress. Neagle and Wilding were together for a fourth time in the Technicolor romance Maytime in Mayfair (1949). The plot is reminiscent of Roberta, as it had Wilding inheriting a dress shop owned by Neagle. David Absalom comments on his great website BritishPictures.com: “These films rarely pleased the critics. This is particularly true of the 'London Series' of frothy nonsense, usually co-starring Michael Wilding and usually musicals. The critics wanted neo-realist pictures depicting grim reality - the audience, who were suffering through the Austerity Years and knew all about grim reality, wanted fun and escapism. Anna Neagle pictures provided that in spades.” British postcard, no. 257. British postcard by Real Photograph, London in the Picturegoer series, no. W 700. Photo: Herbert Wilcox Prods. Florence Nightingale By 1950, Anna Neagle was at her zenith as Britain’s top box-office actress, and in that year she made what reputedly became her own favourite film, Odette, co-starring Trevor Howard, Peter Ustinov, and Marius Goring. As Odette Sansom, she was the Anglo-French resistance fighter who was pushed to the edge of betrayal by the Nazis. Going from this real-life British heroine, she went straight on to playing Florence Nightingale in The Lady with the Lamp (1951). Returning to the stage in 1953, she scored a major success with The Glorious Days, which had a run of 476 performances. Neagle and Wilcox brought the play to the screen under the title Lilacs in the Spring (1954), co-starring Errol Flynn. In the film she plays an actress knocked out by a bomb, who dreams she is Queen Victoria and Nell Gwyn – as well as her own mother. As she begins dreaming, the film switches from black and white to colour. Neagle and Flynn reteamed for a second film together, King's Rhapsody (1955), based on an Ivor Novello musical. Although Neagle performed several musical numbers for the film, most of them were cut from the final release, leaving her with essentially a supporting role. Shot in Eastmancolor and CinemaScope with location work near Barcelona, Spain, King's Rhapsody was a major flop everywhere. Neagle's (and Flynn's) box-office appeal, it seemed, was beginning to fade. Neagle's last box-office hit was My Teenage Daughter (1956), which featured her as a mother trying to prevent her daughter (Sylvia Syms) from lapsing into juvenile delinquency. British postcard by Real Photograph, London. Photo: Herbert Wilcox Productions. Bankrupt Anna Neagle and Syms worked together again on No Time For Tears (Cyril Frankel, 1957), also starring Anthony Quayle and Flora Robson. As directed by Cyril Frankel, this was the first film for over 20 years where Neagle was directed by someone other than Herbert Wilcox. She produced a series of films directed by her husband, including These Dangerous Years (1957), Wonderful Things! (1958), and The Heart of a Man (1959). The films all starred pop idol Frankie Vaughan, but they were out of touch with changing tastes, and lost money, resulting in Wilcox going heavily into debt. Neagle herself made her final film appearance in The Lady is a Square (1959) opposite Frankie Vaughan. Herbert Wilcox was bankrupt by 1964, but his wife soon revived his fortunes. She returned to the stage the following year and made a spectacular comeback in the West End musical Charlie Girl. In it she played the role of a former ´Cochran Young Lady´ who marries a peer of the realm. British postcard by Real Photograph, no. 101A. Photo: British & Dominions Films. Dame of the British Empire Charlie Girl was a phenomenal success that ran for a staggering six years and 2,047 performances. During the show's six-year run, Anna Neagle was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1970 in recognition of her work. Two years after Charlie Girl she appeared in a revival of No, No, Nanette, which she had done onscreen three decades earlier. In 1975, she replaced Celia Johnson in The Dame of Sark and in 1978 (the year after her husband's death), she was acting in Most Gracious Lady, which was written for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Although plagued by Parkinson's disease in her later years, Neagle continued to be active well into her eighties. On TV she was last seen in an episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected (1983). In 1985 she appeared as the Fairy Godmother in a production of Cinderella at the London Palladium. Anna Neagle was still working in 1986, just a few weeks before her death in West Byfleet, England, from complications of renal disease and cancer. She was 81. Movie Legends - Anna Neagle. Source: Basil Nelson (YouTube). Sources: Roger Phillip Mellor (Encyclopedia of British Cinema), David Absalom (BritishPictures.com), Bruce Eder (AllMovie), Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

Claire Lyuche in "Antony and Cleopatra." 1945 Orson Welles and Gudrun Ure in "Othello."1951 Vivien Leigh in "Antony and Cleopatra" .1951 John Gielgud in "Julius Caesar" .1950 Peggy Ashcroft in "Antony and Cleopatra." 1953 Orson Welles and Gudrun Ure in "Othello."1951 Diana Vinyar in "The Merchant of Venice." 1948 Emlyn Williams in 1956 Venets Laurence Olivier and Cherry Cottrell in "Hamlet." 1936 Vivien Leigh in "Antony and Cleopatra" .1951 Fay Compton in "Tempest" in 1957 Robert Helpmenn in "Hamlet." 1948 Alec Kluniz in "Tempest." 1957 -via humus.livejournal.com/2119126.html

East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 1067, 1959. Photo: Rank/Progress. Lovely, delicate-looking actress Muriel Pavlow (1921) belongs firmly to the British cinema of the 1950’s. She was a comely heroine in thrillers and war-themed pictures, and was usually cast as an altruistic bride, wife or girlfriend. In many light comedies she often provided a nice counterbalance to the hectic goings-on. For more postcards, a bio and clips check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

This list could obviously be much, much longer. But for the sake of argument here are my top ten scenes from Hitch. 10. The final scene from The Birds (1963) Pure silence as the few survivors skedaddle out of town. What remains are birds, the triumph of nature over civilization. 9. The opening scene in Strangers on a Train (1951)Since I picked an ending scene, here's an opening one. Hitchcock cuts between two pairs of feet running for a train, then edits in the intersecting tracks to create the perfect visual metaphor for the film to come. 8. The windmill sequence in Foreign Correspondent (1940)A windmill in Holland that turns the wrong way. Joel McCrea, playing intrepid reporter, John Jones, enters this seemingly innocuous space and discovers a spy ring. My favorite example of something ordinary in a Hitchcock film hiding something sinister. 7. The auction scene in North by Northwest (1959)I like this scene so much more than the crop-duster scene. In it Roger Thornhill gets himself arrested in order to escape the clutches of Vandamn. It's the most remarkable combination of humor (Cary Grant is hysterical), suspense, and romance (there's great electricity between Grant and Eva Marie Saint). 6. Mrs. Danvers burns down Manderley in Rebecca (1940) Hauntingly beautiful. The glow of Manderley in the distance, then the shots of Mrs. Danvers running through the burning building. Iconic images. 5. The first appearance of Madeleine in Vertigo (1958) Jimmy Stewart sits at the bar in Ernie's Restaurant and watches as Kim Novak, lit almost as though she were already a ghost, emerges from the shocking red wallpaper. 4. Lars Thorwald peers back in Rear Window (1954) Grace Kelly has just been caught in the murderer's apartment across the way and Jimmy Stewart can only watch helplessly. When the cops arrive she signals that she's wearing the dead wive's wedding ring. Pan to Raymond Burr, who looks from the ring directly across the way at Stewart, and the audience. Brilliance. 3. The shower scene in Psycho (1960) Not so much for the scene itself, although it is of course one of the best shot and edited murder sequences ever put on film, but for Hitchcock's willingness to kill off the heroine of the film before the halfway mark. A total shock that changed cinema forever. 2. The crofter and his wife in The 39 Steps (1935) Richard Hannay is on the run in the Scottish Highlands when he spends a night at the house of a miserable, money-hungry crofter and his sad wife, played beautifully by Peggy Ashcroft. It's a quintessential Hitchcock scene, in which the audience knows the many layers of what each character is feeling, and the suspense and drama emerges from that knowledge. It's complex, frightening, and most importantly, an emotional moment, in which we are given a brief glimpse into a tragic life. 1. The kiss outside the wine cellar in Notorious (1946) Much like the sequence in The 39 Steps, this mini-masterpiece in Notorious, in which spies Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman search through the winecellar for proof of plutonium and then kiss when they are caught by Bergman's husband, played by Claude Rains, is set up by its multiple layers. The kiss is both a ploy, and completely real. Claude Rains' shame on watching the act, exacerbated by the presence of his servant, makes you wonder which is worse, the sexual betrayal or the political one. It all comes together in this one scene, where the physical manifestation of love suddenly trumps politics, danger, and identity.

Googie Withers, de son vrai nom Georgette Lizette Withers, naquit le 12 mars 1917 à Karachi au Pakistan. Elle a joué dans 63 films et séries télévisée de 1935 à 1996. Elle est décédée le 25 juillet...

Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret (centre), Ian Holm as Richard III.

BFI curator Josephine Botting pays tribute to the British film and TV actress Muriel Pavlow, who has died aged 97.