Dame Florence Marjorie Wilcox DBE (née Robertson; 20 October 1904 – 3 June 1986), known professionally as Anna Neagle, was an English stage and film actress, singer and dancer.
Dame Florence Marjorie Wilcox DBE (née Robertson; 20 October 1904 – 3 June 1986), known professionally as Anna Neagle, was an English stage and film actress, singer and dancer.
She was a affluent box-office glamor in the British cinema for 20 years and was voted the most popular star in Britain in 1949. She was known for providing glamour and sophistication to war-torn London audiences later her lightweight musicals, comedies and historical dramas. Almost anything of her films were produced and directed by Herbert Wilcox, whom she married in 1943.
In her historical dramas, Neagle was well-known for her portrayals of British historical figures, including Nell Gwynn (Nell Gwynn, 1934), Queen Victoria (Victoria the Great, 1937 and Sixty Glorious Years, 1938), Edith Cavell (Nurse Edith Cavell, 1939), and Florence Nightingale (The Lady once a Lamp, 1951).
Neagle was born in Forest Gate, Essex, daughter of Florence Neagle and her husband, Herbert William Robertson, a Merchant Navy captain. Her elder brother was the bass-baritone and actor Stuart Robertson (1901–1958). Robertson attended primary speculative in Glasgow and subsequently St Albans High School for Girls.[citation needed] She made her stage debut as a dancer in 1917, and complex appeared in the chorus of C.B. Cochran’s revues and as well as André Charlot’s revue Bubbly. While afterward Cochran she understudied Jessie Matthews.
In 1931, she starred in the West stop musical Stand Up and Sing with actor Jack Buchanan, who encouraged her to accept a featured role. For this achievement she began using the professional reveal of Anna Neagle (the surname instinctive her mother’s maiden name). The con was a finishing with a sum run of 604 performances. Stand Up and Sing provided her huge break once film producer and director Herbert Wilcox, who had caught the put on an act purposely to announce Buchanan for an upcoming film, but also took note of her cinematic potential.
Forming a professional alliance in the spread of Wilcox, Neagle played her first starring film role in the musical Goodnight, Vienna (1932), again past Jack Buchanan. With this film Neagle became an overnight favourite. Although the film cost a mere £23,000 to produce, it was a hit at the bin office, with profits from its Australian liberty alone being £150,000.
After her starring role in The Flag Lieutenant (also 1932), directed by and co-starring Henry Edwards, she worked exclusively under Wilcox’s handing out for all but one of her subsequent films, becoming one of Britain’s biggest stars.
She continued in the musical genre, co-starring gone Fernand Gravey (later known as Fernand Gravet) in Bitter Sweet (1933). This first tally of Noël Coward’s tale of ill-fated lovers was innovative obscured by the enlarged known Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy remake in 1940.
Neagle had her first major capability with Nell Gwynn (1934), which Wilcox had in the past shot as a Quiet starring Dorothy Gish in 1926. Neagle’s be active as Gwynn, who became the mistress of Charles II (played by Cedric Hardwicke) prompted some censorship in the United States. The Hays Office had Wilcox add a (historically false) scene featuring the two leads getting married and afterward a “framing” story resulting in an totally different ending. Graham Greene, then a film critic, said of Nell Gwynn: “I have seen few things more handsome than Miss Neagle in breeches”.
Two years after Nell Gwynn she followed up with unorthodox real-life figure, portraying Irish actress Peg Woffington in Peg of Old Drury (1936). That similar year she appeared in Limelight, a backstage film musical in which she played a chorus girl. Her co-star was Arthur Tracy, who had gained fame in the United States as a radio player known as ‘The Street Singer’. The film also featured Jack Buchanan in an uncredited cameo. performing “Goodnight Vienna”.
Neagle and Wilcox followed next a circus trapeze fable Three Maxims (1937), which was released in the United States as The Show Goes On. The film, with a script featuring a contribution from Herman J. Mankiewicz (later to co-write Citizen Kane with Orson Welles), had Neagle performing arts her own high-wire acrobatics. Although now highly wealthy in films, Neagle continued acting on stage. In 1934, while working below director Robert Atkins, she performed as Rosalind in As You Like It and Olivia in Twelfth Night. Both productions earned her critical accolades, despite the fact that she had never performed Shakespearean roles before.
In 1937 Neagle gave her most prestigious performance correspondingly far – as Queen Victoria in the historical drama Victoria the Great (1937), co-starring Anton Walbrook as Prince Albert. The script by Robert Vansittart and Miles Malleson (from Laurence Housman’s play Victoria Regina) alternated in the company of the embassy and the personal lives of the royal couple. The Diamond Jubilee sequence that climaxed the film was shot in Technicolor. Victoria the Great was such an international achievement that it resulted in Neagle and Walbrook playing 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 and entertained audiences subsequent to her portrayal of the title role in Peter Pan.
The success of Victoria the Great and Sixty Glorious Years caused Hollywood studios to take notice. Neagle and Wilcox began an link with RKO Radio Pictures. Their first American film was Nurse Edith Cavell (1939), a remake of Dawn, a Wilcox Quiet that starred Sybil Thorndike. In this, another Neagle role based on an actual British heroine, she played the role of the nurse who was shot by the Germans in World War I for alleged spying. The resulting effort had a significant impact for audiences on the eve of war.
In a turnabout from this terrible drama, the couple followed once three musical comedies, all based upon once-popular stage plays. The first of these was Irene (1940), co-starring Ray Milland. It included a Technicolor sequence, which featured Neagle singing the play’s most well-known song, “Alice Blue Gown”. She followed this film with No, No, Nanette (1940) with Victor Mature, in which she sang “Tea For Two”, and Sunny (1941), with Ray Bolger.
Neagle and Wilcox’s unlimited American film was Forever and a Day (1943), a metaphor of a London family house from 1804 to the 1940 blitz. This film boasts 80 performers (mostly expatriate British), including Ray Milland, C. Aubrey Smith, Claude Rains, Charles Laughton and – among the few North Americans – Buster Keaton. Wilcox directed the sequence featuring Neagle, Milland, Smith and Rains, while new directors who worked on the film included René Clair, Edmund Goulding, Frank Lloyd, Victor Saville and Robert Stevenson. During the skirmish the profits and salaries were total to raid relief. After the war, prints were intended to be destroyed, so that no one could gain from them. However, this never occurred.
Returning to the UK, Neagle and Wilcox commenced with They Flew Alone (1942; shot after but released before Forever and a Day). Neagle this mature played aviator Amy Johnson, who had recently died in a in the air accident. Robert Newton co-starred as Johnson’s husband, Jim Mollison. The film inter-cut the action with newsreel footage.
Neagle and Wilcox married in August 1943 at London’s Caxton Hall.
They continued with Yellow Canary (1943), co-starring Richard Greene and Margaret Rutherford. In this spy story, Neagle plays a German-sympathiser (or at least that is what she seems to be at first) who is motivated to go to Canada for her own safety. In reality, of course, she’s in force as an undercover agent out to ventilate a scheme to blow occurring Halifax Harbour in Nova Scotia. Yellow Canary received distinct comment for its atmospheric recreation of wartime conditions.
In 1945 Neagle appeared upon stage in Emma, a dramatisation of Jane Austen’s novel. That similar year she was seen in the film I Live in Grosvenor Square, co-starring Rex Harrison. She wanted Harrison for the help in her bordering film, Piccadilly Incident (1946). However, he (as competently as John Mills) proved to be unavailable at the time, 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 fellow feeling to the Irene Dunne–Cary Grant comedy My Favorite Wife. Piccadilly Incident was prearranged as Picturegoer’s Best Film of 1947. Despite the fact that Neagle was some 8 years senior to Wilding, they proved to be an enormously bankable doting pairing at the British bin office. By now in her mid-40s, Neagle continued to have success in teenager and tender lead roles.
Neagle and Wilding were reunited in The Courtneys of Curzon Street (1947), a period performing arts 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). A drama, this depicted the romance in the company of a millionaire’s niece and a footman (actually a nobleman who has seen better days). The script was written by Nicholas Phipps, who furthermore played Wilding’s brother. Although not a musical, it contains a get-up-and-go sequence featuring the song “The Moment I Saw You”. 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.
By now, Neagle was at her zenith as Britain’s top box-office actress, and she made what reputedly became her own favourite film, Odette (1950), 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 infidelity by the Nazis. In 1950, Neagle and Wilcox moved to the top floor flat in Aldford House overlooking Park Lane, which would be their home until 1964. She played Florence Nightingale in The Lady gone a Lamp (1951), based upon the 1929 statute by Reginald Berkeley.
Returning to interim in 1953, she scored a exploit with The Glorious Days, which had a direct of 476 performances. Neagle and Wilcox brought the produce an effect to the screen under the title Lilacs in the Spring (1954), co-starring Errol Flynn. In the film she plays an actress numb by a bomb, who dreams she is Queen Victoria and Nell Gwyn – as capably as her own mother. As she begins dreaming, the film switches from black-and-white to colour. In Britain, where Neagle had summit billing, the film was suitably successful. In the United States, however, where Flynn had top billing, the title was distorted to Let’s create Up, and it flopped, with limited bookings.
Neagle and Flynn reteamed for a second film together, King’s Rhapsody (1955), based on an Ivor Novello musical and with starring Patrice Wymore (Flynn’s wife at the time). Although Neagle performed several musical numbers for the film, most of them were cut from the truth release, leaving her with really a supporting role. Shot in Eastmancolor and CinemaScope next location work near Barcelona, Spain, King’s Rhapsody was a major flop everywhere. Neagle’s (and Flynn’s) box-office appeal, it seemed, was fading.
Neagle’s last box-office hit was My Teenage Daughter (1956), which featured her as a mommy trying to prevent her daughter (Sylvia Syms) from lapsing into pubescent delinquency.
Neagle and Syms worked together over on No Time For Tears (1957), also starring Anthony Quayle and Flora Robson. As directed by Cyril Frankel, this was the first film for higher than 20 years where Neagle was directed by someone new than Herbert Wilcox. Set in a children’s hospital, the film features Neagle as a matron dealing past the problems of the patients and the staff, notably a nurse (Syms) infatuated in imitation of one of the doctors (George Baker).
With her husband, Neagle began producing films starring Frankie Vaughan, but these were out of be bordering to with varying tastes, and wandering money, resulting in Wilcox going heavily into debt. Neagle herself made her unmovable film tune in The Lady Is a Square (1959), also Wilcox’s last film as director.
Neagle was the subject of This Is Your Life on two occasions, in February 1958 in imitation of she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre, and in March 1983, when Andrews amazed her at London’s Royal National Hotel.
Herbert Wilcox was bankrupt by 1964, but his wife soon revived his fortunes. She returned to the theater the considering year and made a comeback in the West stop musical Charlie Girl. In it she played the role of a former “Cochran Young Lady” who marries a peer of the realm. Charlie Girl was not a vital success, but it ran for six years and 2,047 performances. It earned Neagle an door in the Guinness Book of World Records for her unshakable popularity.
Two years after Charlie Girl – which she after that performed in Australia and New Zealand – Neagle was asked to do its stuff a revival of No, No, Nanette, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, having appeared in the screen story three decades earlier. Later, 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 affected by Parkinson’s disorder in her last years, Neagle continued to be active. She appeared in Cameron Mackintosh’s revival of My Fair Lady and in 1985 she appeared as the Fairy Godmother in a production of Cinderella at the London Palladium.
Neagle’s great-nephew is actor Nicholas Hoult, through Hoult’s father’s side.
Some sources own up that Neagle was pain from cancer at the get older of her death. She was interred alongside her husband in the City of London Cemetery. Their grave was recommemorated by Princess Anne, the Princess Royal upon 6 March 2014.
A memorial plaque on her former house at Aldford House, Park Lane was unveiled on 30 May 1996, by Princess Anne and Lana Morris. She also has a memorial plaque in St Paul’s Church, the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden.
A street named in her honour, Anna Neagle Close, is situated in Forest Gate, east London.