Margaret Rutherford Biography

Quick Facts

NAME: Margaret Rutherford
OCCUPATION: Film Actress, Television Actress
BIRTH DATE: May 11, 1892
DEATH DATE: May 22, 1972
EDUCATION: Old Vic School

PLACE OF BIRTH: London, United Kingdom
PLACE OF DEATH: Chalfont St. Peter, United Kingdom

more about Margaret

Best Known For

Dame Margaret Rutherford was an Academy Award-winning English actress on stage, film and television. Her best known role was Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.

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Dame Margaret Rutherford

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Synopsis

Dame Margaret Rutherford was born on May 11, 1892 in London and studied theater at the Old Vic School. Rutherford made her film debut in 1936, but is best known for later roles, including Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. She won the Academy Award for best supporting actress in 1963 and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1967. She died in 1972.

Profile

(born May 11, 1892, London, Eng.—died May 22, 1972, Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire) actress who was popular on the British stage and screen from the 1930s in roles as a lovable English eccentric.

Rutherford was raised by two aunts who encouraged her interest in the theatre. After teaching piano for five years and elocution for three, she entered the Old Vic School in London to study theatre (1925). Appearing frequently on the London stage from the early 1930s, she received critical notice for her role in Henrik Ibsen's Master Builder (1934). Her first great success was as the unconventional Miss Bijou Furse in Spring Meeting (1938). In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1939), she played Miss Prism, a part she repeated on the screen in 1952; and in Nol Coward's Blithe Spirit (1941), she played the bicycling medium in both the stage and the motion-picture version (1945).

Although she made her film debut in 1936, Rutherford is best known for later pictures, which include Passport to Pimlico (1949); The Mouse on the Moon (1963); and as Miss Marple in Agatha Christie's detective series, Murder She Said (1961), Murder at the Gallop (1963), Murder Ahoy (1964), and Murder Most Foul (1964). For her portrayal of the unconventional Duchess of Brighton in The VIPs (1963), Rutherford won the Academy Award for best supporting actress. In 1967 she was made a Dame of the British Empire.