British actress (1919?2015)
Nova Pilbeam
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Born
| Nova Margery Pilbeam
(
1919-11-15
)
15 November 1919
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Died
| 17 July 2015
(2015-07-17)
(aged 95)
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Occupation
| Actress
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Spouse(s)
| Pen Tennyson
(m. 1939?1941)
Alexander Whyte
(m. 1950?1972)
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Children
| 1
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Nova Margery Pilbeam
(15 November 1919 ? 17 July 2015) was an English film and stage actress. She played leading roles in two
Alfred Hitchcock
films of the 1930s, and made her last film in 1948.
Early life
[
edit
]
Pilbeam was born in
Wimbledon
,
Surrey
[1]
(now part of the
London Borough of Merton
). Her parents were Arnold Pilbeam, an actor and theatre manager, and Margery Stopher Pilbeam.
[2]
Time
magazine reported that the actress, whose first name was an homage to her maternal grandmother from Nova Scotia, opted to keep her birth name, which she considered far less ridiculous than "
Myrna Loy
" or "
Greta Garbo
".
[3]
Career
[
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]
Pilbeam gained attention as a child stage actress. This led to much work in her teen years. She appeared in
Alfred Hitchcock
's film
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1934), in which she plays a girl abducted by
Peter Lorre
's character, following this with her lead performance as
Lady Jane Grey
in
Tudor Rose
(1936). She had a starring role in Hitchcock's
Young and Innocent
(1937), which she regarded as "the sunniest film I was involved with", and formed a constructive professional relationship with Hitchcock.
[2]
She appeared in an early British television drama in 1939. That year
David O. Selznick
wanted Pilbeam for the lead in Hitchcock's
Rebecca
(1940), and thought she could be an international film star. However, her agent was worried about the length of a five-year contract; meanwhile, Hitchcock, whose outlook on the film was not the same as Selznick's, auditioned hundreds of others over many months, at last giving the role to
Joan Fontaine
.
[2]
Unlike some of her peers, Pilbeam never made a film in
Hollywood
, despite having made a month-long trip to America with
Gaumont-British
Studios head
Michael Balcon
and one of his lead actors,
Jack Hulbert
, in 1934. She continued acting, with appearances in at least nine British films, along with many stage roles, throughout the 1940s. One of her last films was
The Three Weird Sisters
(1948), its post-war Gothic-drama screenplay credited to five writers, among them
Dylan Thomas
. She remained working on stage for a short while longer, appearing at the
Duchess Theatre
in Toni Block's play
Flowers for the Living
in February 1950.
Personal life
[
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]
Pilbeam married
Pen Tennyson
, a great-grandson of the poet
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
and an assistant director to Hitchcock, in 1939. Tennyson became a
film director
the year they were married, but he died in a plane crash in 1941 while working as part of the
Admiralty
's instructional films unit. She was married to
BBC Radio
journalist Alexander Whyte from 1950 until his death in 1972. Their child Sarah Jane was born in 1952.
[3]
[4]
In her last years, Pilbeam lived in
Dartmouth Park
, north London. She died on 17 July 2015 in London, aged 95.
[2]
[3]
Filmography
[
edit
]
References
[
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]
External links
[
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]
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