Anna Neagle

An aspiring ballerina who was molded into one of Britain's leading screen heroines of the 1930s and 40s by producer-director Herbert Wilcox, whom she married in 1943. Most typically in gentle but stiff-upper-lip roles, Neagle played in a variety of films but is perhaps best remembered for her gallery of historical figures, from Nell Gwyn (in the 1934 film of that name) to aviatrix Amy Johnson (in "They Flew Alone" 1942) to Florence Nightingale (in "The Lady with a Lamp" 1951) to her most famous role, Queen Victoria, in the immensely popular "Victoria the Great" (1937) and its sequel "Sixty Glorious Years" (1938). She also starred in occasional musicals, including "Irene" (1940) and sometimes also did romantic comedy, such as the highly popular "Spring in Park Lane" (1948). Neagle enjoyed a measure of success in films made in Hollywood from 1939 until the middle war years, and after her more than quarter century of film stardom petered out in the late 1950s, she returned with considerable success to the British stage.