Queer Places:
1860 Aigle, Switzerland
Mary Lilian Agnes Morris (13 December 1915 – 14 October 1988) was a British actress. RADA-trained and a rooftop-shouting lesbian in her day, she is best remembered for her work with filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and for having played a rare female version of the character Number Two in the cult favourite special agent series The Prisoner. She was also an accomplished woodworker and made her final home in Switzerland, singlehandedly converting a cowshed into a chalet. She was a friend to the likes of
Noel Coward and
Ivor Novello and for several years was in a relationship with actress
Coral Browne. She also drove a motorcycle while wearing full leathers until the day she died.
Morris was the daughter of Herbert Stanley Morris, a botanist, and his wife Sylvia Ena de Creft-Harford. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Morris made her stage debut in Lysistrata at the Gate Theatre, London in 1935. She performed with Leslie Howard in "Pimpernel" Smith (1941)[1] and Anna Petrovitch in the Ealing war movie Undercover (1943) as the wife of a Serbian guerrilla leader. On television, she played Professor Madeleine Dawnay in the science-fiction television drama A for Andromeda (and its sequel, The Andromeda Breakthrough), Queen Margaret in the BBC's An Age of Kings (a version of Shakespeare's History Plays), Lady Macbeth in the 1960 radio production of Macbeth, and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (as part of the BBC's adaptation of Shakespeare's Roman plays, The Spread of the Eagle) in 1963.[2]
She played Number Two in The Prisoner's episode "Dance of the Dead". After an absence of many years, she reappeared in diverse film roles such as Madame Fidolia the Russian ballerina and theatre school director in the BBC television serial Ballet Shoes (1975), and the mother of the murdered boy in the 1977 horror film Full Circle. She also appeared on television in Doctor Who in the story Kinda (1982), playing the pivotal role of the shaman Panna opposite Peter Davison.
Her other television appearances included the Countess Vronsky in the BBC's Anna Karenina (1977); the macabre, ancient relative in the Walter de la Mare story Seaton's Aunt (1983) in Granada Television's Shades of Darkness series; a recently deceased woman attempting to cheat death in a 1988 episode of HBO's Ray Bradbury Theater; Mrs Browning-Browning in Stephen Wyatt's Claws (BBC 1 1987); and the formidable matriarch in Police at the Funeral, an adaptation of one of
Margery Allingham's Albert Campion stories for the BBC's Campion (1989).
In addition to her film role, she played Elizabeth the First on a 'Makers of History' LP record, using the queen's spoken and written words and contemporary music, issued by EMI in 1964.[3]
She died from heart failure on 14 October 1988 in Aigle, Switzerland.
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