Margaret Lockwood, CBE, film, stage and television actress who became Britain's leading box-office star in the 1940s, died of cirrhosis of the liver in London on 15^th July, 1990 aged 73. She was born on 15^th September, 1916.

Margaret Mary Lockwood, the daughter of an English administrator of an Indian railway company, by his Scottish third wife, was born in Karachi, where she lived for the first three and a half years of her life. In 1920, she and her brother, Lyn, came to England with their mother to settle in the south London suburb of Upper Norwood, and Margaret enrolled as a pupil at Sydenham High School. Her childhood was repressed and unhappy, largely due to the character of her mother, a dominant and possessive woman who was often cruelly discouraging to their shy, sensitive daughter. As a result, Margaret took refuge in a world of make believe and dreamed of becoming a great star of musical comedy. After becoming a dance pupil at the Italia Conti school, she made her stage debut at 15 as a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Holborn Empire. A year later, she played another fairy, for 30 shillings a week, in Babes in the Wood at the Scala Theatre. The excitement of "walking on" in Noel Coward's mammoth spectacular, Cavalcade, at Drury Lane in 1931 came to an abrupt conclusion when her mother removed her from the production after learning that a chorus boy had uttered a forbidden four-letter expletive in front of her.

In 1933, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she was seen in Leontine Sagan's production of Hannele by a leading London agent, Herbert de Leon, who at once signed her as a client and arranged a screen test which impressed the director, Basil Dean, into giving her the second lead in his film, Lorna Doone when Dorothy Hyson fell ill. Seven ingenue screen roles followed before she played opposite Maurice Chevalier in the 1936 remake of The Beloved Vagabond. A year later she married Rupert Leon, a man of whom her mother disapproved strongly, so much so that for six months Margaret Lockwood did not live with her husband and was afraid to tell her mother that the marriage had taken place.

In 1938, Lockwood's role as a young London nurse in Carol Reed's film, Bank Holiday, established her as a star, and the enormous success of her next film, Alfred Hitchcock's taut thriller The Lady Vanishes, opposite Michael Redgrave, gave her international status. A visit to Hollywood to appear with Shirley Temple in Susannah of the Mounties and with Douglas Fairbanks, Jnr, in Rulers of the Sea was not at all to her liking. She returned with relief to Britain to star in two of Carol Reed's best films, The Stars Look Down, again with Redgrave, and Night Train to Munich, opposite Rex Harrison.

In 1941, she gave birth to a daughter by Leon, Julia Lockwood, affectionately known to her mother as "Toots", who was also to become a successful actress. The Leons separated soon after her birth and were divorced in 1950. Lockwood gained custody of her daughter, but not before Mrs Lockwood had sided with her son-in-law to allege that Margaret was "an unfit mother".

The turning point in her career came in 1943, when she was cast opposite James Mason in The Man in Grey, as an amoral schemer who steals the husband of her best friend, played by Phyllis Calvert, and then ruthlessly murders her. Spectral in black, with her dark, dramatic looks, cold but beautiful eyes, and vividly overpainted thin lips, Lockwood was a queen among villainesses. The film inaugurated a series of hothouse melodramas that came to be known as Gainsborough Gothic and had film fans queuing outside cinemas all over Britain.

In 1944, in A Place of One's Own, she added one further attribute to her armoury: a beauty spot painted high on her left cheek. It became her trade mark and the impudent ornament of her most outrageous film, The Wicked Lady, again opposite Mason, in which she played the ultimate in murderous husband-stealers, Lady Skelton, who amuses herself at night with highway robbery. The amount of cleavage exposed by Lockwood's Restoration gowns caused consternation to the film censors, and apprehension was in the air before the premiere, attended by Queen Mary, who astounded everyone by thoroughly enjoying it. The film's worldwide success put Lockwood at the top of Britain's cinema polls for the next five years.

After poisoning several husbands in Bedelia (1946), Lockwood became less wicked in Hungry Hill, Jassy and The White Unicorn, all opposite Dennis Price. She complained to the head of her studio, J. Arthur Rank, that she was "sick of sinning", but paradoxically, as her roles grew nicer, her popularity declined. She refused to return to Hollywood to make Forever Amber, and unwisely turned down the film of Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version. Her contract with Rank was dissolved in 1950 and a film deal with Herbert Wilcox, who was married to her principal cinema rival, Anna Neagle, resulted in three disappointing flops. In 1955, she gave one of her best performances, as a blowsy ex-barmaid, in Cast A Dark Shadow, opposite Dirk Bogarde, but her box office appeal had waned and the British cinema suddenly lost interest in her.

An unpretentious woman, who disliked the trappings of stardom and dealt brusquely with adulation, she accepted this change in her fortunes with unconcern, and turned to the stage, where she had successes in Peter Pan, Pygmalion, Private Lives and Agatha Christie's thriller, Spider's Web, which ran for over a year. In 1965, she co-starred with her daughter, Julia, in a popular television series, The Flying Swan, and surprised those who felt she had never been a very good actress by giving a superb comedy performance in the West End revival of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

After what she regarded as her mother's painful betrayal at the custody hearing, the two women never met again, and when a friend complimented Mrs Lockwood on her daughter's performance in The Wicked Lady, she snapped: "That wasn't acting. That was natural". Lockwood never remarried, declaring: "I would never stick my head into that noose again", but she lived for many years with the actor, John Stone, whom she met when they appeared together in the 1959 stage comedy, And Suddenly It's Spring. Stone appeared with her in her award winning 1970s television series, Justice, in which she played a woman barrister, but after 17 years together, he left her to marry a theatre wardrobe mistress. This last blow, coupled with the sudden death of her trusted agent, Herbert de Leon, and the onset of a viral ear infection, vestibulitis, caused her to turn her back gradually on a glittering career.

She had one last film role, as the stepmother with the sobriquet, "wicked", omitted but implied, in Bryan Forbes's Cinderella musical The Slipper and the Rose in 1976. Her final stage appearance, as Queen Alexandra in Motherdear, ran for only six weeks at the Ambassadors' Theatre in 1980.

That year, she was created CBE, but her presence at her investiture at Buckingham Palace, accompanied by her three grandchildren, was her last public appearance. For the remaining years of her life, she was a complete recluse at her home in Kingston upon Thames, rejecting all invitations and offers of work. In spite of this, she was warmly remembered by the public. When the author Hilton Tims, was preparing his biography, Once a Wicked Lady, a stall holder from whom he was buying some flowers for her, snatched up a second bunch and said, "Give her these from me. I used to love her films."

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Margaret Lockwood, the last totally English film star to have stayed at the top of the cinema box office polls for several years in succession, died last night in the Cromwell Hospital in west London at the age of 73. Whereas the rest of her 1940s generation, from Jean Simmons and Deborah Kerr to James Mason and Stewart Granger, went to seek international fame in Hollywood, Miss Lockwood maintained a totally local kind of stardom that nevertheless altered radically over the decades. Born Margaret Day in India (1917 was the date she usually gave, though some reports put it as early as 1911) she started in films with ingenue roles in the middle 1930s, notably Lorna Doone and The Beloved Vagabond, before she was taken up by Hitchcock for the classic 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, in which she

played opposite Michael Redgrave. The Lady Vanishes made Lockwood a star and took her almost immediately to Hollywood. She was there for less than a year and only two movies, from which she returned to some very much better wartime work in England, notably in another train thriller Night Train to Munich, The Stars Look Down and Quiet Wedding. But it was in 1943 with The Man in Grey that she, Phyllis Calvert, Stewart Granger and James Mason formed themselves into the quartet of Gainsborough stars most often to be found through the rest of the war years in a succession of snobbery-with-violence pictures, usually involving period costumes and a good horsewhipping. Lockwood would end up in these bruised by James Mason (The Wicked Lady, probably her best-known film). As Granger and Mason moved on to sunnier Californian contracts, Lockwood's career went into roughly the same decline as the English cinema itself, before finishing up in Bryan Forbes's The Slipper and the Rose, her last big screen appearance in 1976. In the meantime, however, she had begun to carve out a new career in the theatre. She played Peter Pan for three seasons and had a long Savoy run in the thriller Spider's Web. She also had three long-running television serials, notably Justice. She was married once (to Rupert Leon), divorcing 40 years ago, and leaves a daughter, the actress Julia Lockwood. Phyllis Calvert said last night: 'Over the last ten years she lived quite like a hermit. As a young actress, though, she was very gay but very serious about her work.'

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A service of thanksgiving for the life and work of Miss Margaret Lockwood was held yesterday at St Paul's, Covent Garden. The Very Rev David Elliott officiated. Miss Jean Kent read from the works of Rudyard Kipling and Miss Phyllis Calvert from the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Miss Polly James paid tribute. Mr Barrie Bignold, piano, played The Cornish Rhapsody by Hubert Bath and Miss Anne Rogers sang Love Steals Your Heart from the film The Wicked Lady.

Among those present were: Mr Ernest Clark and Miss Julia Lockwood (son-in-law and daughter), Mr Tim Clark and Mr Nicholas Clark (grandsons), Lucy and Catherine Clark (granddaughters), Miss Penny Robinson, Mrs Betty Lait, Mr Simon Lait, Miss Jean Lait, Miss Sarah Gall, Mr Nicholas Gall, Miss Tamara Gall, Mr Andrew Clark, Mrs Ginny Tristan, Mrs Rosanna Cheyney. Sir Peter and Lady Saunders, Miss Chili Bouchier, Mr Maurice Denham, Mr Robert Flemyng, Mr Desmond Llewellyn, Miss Kathleen Byron, Mr Francis Burrow, Miss Eve Southwood, Miss June Wyndham-Davies, Mrs Beryl Cook, Mr Anthony Holland, Mr Theo Cowan, Mr Michael Thornton, Miss Deddie Davies, Miss Hazel Bainbridge, Miss Patricia Dainton, Mr Norman Williams, Mr John Stone, Mr A Jackson, Mr Robert Eddison, Mr and Mrs Michael Cochrane. Mr Alan Sleath (chairman, Associates of RADA) with Miss Barbara Todd; Miss Ella Slack (BBC), Mr Frank Coven (London director, Nine TV Network of Australia) and Mrs Coven, Mr E Gansler (British Music Hall Society), Miss Judith Craig (Henry Sherwood Productions), Mr Ken Gibson (Contact Artists Association), Mr William Quinn (Irish Actors' Equity Association), Mr Ken Sefton (Gallery First Nighters Club) and Mr Patrick Newley (Stage and TV Today).