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Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford, DBE (11
May 1892 – 22 May 1972) was an English actress of stage, television and film.
She came to prominence 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.
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.[1][2]
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 afterwards, so 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, and she suffered intermittent bouts of depression and anxiety.[3]
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.[4] 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 which 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".[5]
Rutherford, a talented pianist who first found work as a piano teacher and
a teacher of elocution, went into acting relatively late in life, making her
stage debut in 1925, at age 33, in the Old Vic. As her celebrated "spaniel
jowls" and bulky frame made the part of a romantic heroine out of the
question, 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.[5] 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's 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."[6] Rutherford's
quirky and energetic stage presence was such that she could deftly steal a
scene even when playing relatively minor roles. 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.
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 screen success. 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 also joined a host of distinguished comedy
stars, including 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.[2] 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.[2][7] 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 light comedy relief, in Terence
Rattigan's The
V.I.P.s (1963), a film featuring a star-studded cast led by Dame
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 women 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.
In 1945, Rutherford, fifty-three, married character actor Stringer
Davis, forty-six, after a courtship that lasted for 15 years. Davis's
mother reportedly considered Rutherford an unsuitable match for her son, and
their wedding was postponed until after Mrs. Davis had died.[8] 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."[9] The
former serviceman and actor 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 life.
The Marple films capture something of the couple's public personae as
projected in the press at the time: their cosy domesticity, erratic
housekeeping and almost childlike innocence and affection. 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. Rutherford was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1967.
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.[10] 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's play that
helped to make her name.
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