THE ENGLISH ROSES (III)
MARGARET LOCKWOOD
An actress who could never been considered ‘difficult’, and who unquestionably was the star of the 1940s, is Margaret Lockwood. She had on average 5,000 fan letters a week and provoked huge queues at the box office wherever her films played, and yet her talent seemed to be difficult for her critics (and there were many) to understand. Whenever she made a good picture, they would heap their praise on the directors and screenwriters; when she starred in a bad film, then she got the blame. One critic reviewing Cardboard Cavalier (1948), which was not a success, wrote: ‘A custard pie in Lockwood’s face is not particularly funny, but I find it very satisfying’.
Cinema elites dismissed her as having no personality and lacking the appeal of foreign stars. Producers claimed she couldn’t act, and a spokesman for Rank when they finally closed down their ‘Charm School’ stated that they couldn’t even find another Lockwood. Yet twenty million paid at the box office to watch Margaret Lockwood in one of the most popular films of the War Years, Love Story (1944). She played a pianist who has only a few months to live, and on wind‑swept cliff‑tops, against romantic piano concerto, she has a passionate affair with a man who is going blind. Then in 1946 she played the outrageous, murderous highway‑woman Lady Skelton in The Wicked Lady and over thirty million paid more than a million pounds. No Hollywood female star had created such figures for film‑makers. Not bad results for a girl who couldn’t act.
She was born in Karachi, her father the chief superintendent on India’s North West Railway, and was brought back to England at the age of two. At thirteen she made her stage debut as a ‘babe’ in Babes In The Wood, at the Scala Theatre in London, and then proceeded to appear in cabarets and ‘tea dances’ before she enrolled simultaneously at RADA and a school of dancing. It would seem that the seeds of workaholism were planted at an early age. She did indeed thrive on work: it was said that if you wandered into Rank’s three leading ladies’ dressing rooms you would find shopping lists and materials for the home in Phyllis Calvert’s, make‑up and fashionable clothes in Patricia Roc's, and in Margaret Lockwood’s there would only be the latest script and a photograph of her daughter.
She had a compulsion and talent for work. By the time she started to concentrate on a film career, she had been in numerous West End theatre successes. In 1937 she made her presence felt with a touching portrayal of the lonely nurse in Carol Reed’s Bank Holiday and consequently Hitchcock immediately cast her as the heroine in The Lady Vanishes (1938), a - probably the key to the positive audience reaction when she later played her ‘wicked’ roles. She was whisked off to Hollywood, but, like close friend Phyllis Calvert, she had mo wish to settle in the film capital.
Marriage, a daughter (whom she nicknamed Toots) and votes as top female actress for three consecutive years – 1946, 1947 and 1948 – in nationwide polls sponsored by the Daily Mail turned her into a lasting star. The film which started the adulation was The Man In Grey (1943) in which she played the scheming mistress of her best friend’s husband, who allows her friend to die from pneumonia before finally being whipped to death by her furious lover. Then in 1945, The Wicked Lady shocked and delighted both film-makers and audiences. She said it the time: ‘The public adores the stuff… we never had any location shooting on The Man in Grey or The Wicked Lady. A couple of strategically placed trees and a plant or two, stuck in the studio, made a forest, and nobody asks questions.’ Not so the critics. She was dismayed by the critical reaction (Birmingham City Council banned it as ‘too unhealthy for Sunday viewing’) and her producers panicked after reviews on the day of the Royal premiere to be attended by Queen Mary. Although she was known publicly as a broad-minded woman, should she be allowed to attend? Representatives were called from Marlborough House to see it and they passed it fit for a queen. In fact, it subsequently became one of Queen Mary’s favourites and often showed it privately to friends.
Margaret Lockwood was a film phenomenon. She was also a ‘trouper’ and a natural performer. She would finish a film, rehearse a new play, pack her bags, load the car with luggage and Toots and drive off to tour the provinces. She’d soon be back filming and looking forward to a stint of Peter Pan at the Scala.
Margaret Lockwood was a star who always had something more than an attractive face and a permanent beauty mark on her cheek. She was no ordinary girl who appealed to all other ordinary girls. She could act. And even though she suffered in private over the critiques thrown at her by the media, she never let it show in public. She once threw this exit line at a group of critics who were invited to a preview and attended a Q&A afterwards: 'Goodbye, it was nice to be among friends, even though they aren’t mine.’
VIRGINIA MCKENNA