Biography
Born in India to a British railway clerk, Margaret Lockwood was educated at London's Italia Conti School.After training for an acting career at RADA (several years after her official stage debut at age 12), she made her first film in 1935, billed as Margie Day.
After this Margaret was given a role in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938).
She left the screen in favour of the stage in 1955, then made a long overdue return to films in The Slipper and the Rose (1976). Books on Margaret Lockwood's career include her own autobiography Lucky Star (1955) and Hilton Tims' Once a Wicked Lady (1989).
However, it was undoubtedly the 1940s melodramas that established her reputation, starting with her performance as the wicked Hesther in
The Man in Grey and reaching a peak with the even more amoral Lady Barbara Skelton in The Wicked Lady (1945).
This last performance in particular created an indelible impression and catapulted her to the top - in 1945 and 1946 she was unarguably
the most popular homegrown female star in British cinema.
Her range was also rather wider than her two best-known roles suggest, as she also played the doomed concert pianist in Love Story
(1944), the haunted companion in A Place of One's Own (1945) and the music-hall star in I'll Be Your Sweetheart (1945),
though Bedelia (1946) capitalised on her popular image as a villainess by casting her as a serial-killing bride.
But after the war her career declined surprisingly rapidly. A final Gainsborough melodrama, Jassy (1947) failed to recapture
the old magic, though it did at least give her an opportunity to show off a whole wardrobe of vivid costumes in glorious Technicolor. But
her later filmography is resolutely undistinguished, and from the mid-1950s onwards she worked almost exclusively in television.
In 1965 she co-starred in a popular British television programme"The Flying Swan"(1965) with her actress/daughter Julia Lockwood.
She lived for many years with actor John Stone, who appeared with her in the 1959 play "And Suddenly It's Spring" and the 70s TV series "Justice" (1972).
From 1960 to her death in 1990, Margaret lived at Upper Park Road, Kingston Hill, UK, which overlooks Richmond Park and is near to the Kingston Gate entrance of the park.
There are plans to mark her residency in Upper Park Rd with a blue plaque. This can only come about 20 years after her death (2010). In the late 1990s, Kingston County Council named a street after her in the borough to celebrate its most famous resident. It is called Margaret Lockwood Close.
Created DBE (Dame of the British Empire) in 1980, which was her last public appearance. She lived in virtual reclusion
until her death 10 years later.