Dame Anna Neagle, DBE (October 20, 1904 – June 3, 1986) was a popular English stage and motion picture actress and singer.
Neagle proved to be a box-office sensation in British films for over 25 years. She was noted for providing glamour and sophistication to war-torn London audiences with her lightweight musicals, comedies and historical dramas. She won several awards as Britain's favourite actress and biggest female box-office draw. Almost all of her films were produced and directed by Herbert Wilcox, whom she married in 1943.
In her historical dramas, Neagle was renowned for her portrayals of real-life British heroines, including:
Nell Gwynn (Nell Gwynn, 1934)
Peg Woffington (Peg of Old Drury, 1934)
Queen Victoria (Victoria the Great, 1937, and Sixty Glorious Years, 1938)
Edith Cavell (Nurse Edith Cavell, 1939)
Amy Johnson (They Flew Alone, 1941)
Odette Sansom (Odette, 1951)
Florence Nightingale (The Lady with the Lamp, 1951)
Anna Neagle was born Florence Marjorie Robertson in Forest Gate, London, the daughter Herbert Robertson, a merchant navy captain, and his wife, the former Florence Neagle. She made her stage debut as a dancer in 1917, and later appeared in the chorus of C.B. Cochran's revues and also André Charlot's revue Bubbly. While with Cochran she understudied Jessie Matthews.
Anna Neagle in a 1931 portrait.
In 1931 she starred in the West End musical Stand Up and Sing (1931), with actor Jack Buchanan, who encouraged her to take a featured role. For this play she began using the professional name of Anna Neagle (the surname being her mother's maiden name). The play was a huge success with a total run of 604 performances. Stand Up and Sing provided her big break when film producer and director Herbert Wilcox, who had caught the show purposely to consider Buchanan for an upcoming film, but also took note of her cinematic potential.
Forming a professional alliance with Wilcox, Neagle played her first starring film role in the musical Goodnight Vienna (1932), again opposite Jack Buchanan. With this film Neagle became an overnight favourite. Although the film cost a mere £23,000 to a produce, it was a huge hit at the box office (its profit from its Australian release alone was £150,000.
After her starring role in The Flag Lieutenant that same year, directed by and co-starring Henry Edwards, she worked exclusively under Wilcox's direction for all but one of her subsequent films. With his guidance she soon became one of England's biggest.
She continued in the musical genre with, co-starring with Fernand Graavey (later known as Fernand Gravet) in Bitter Sweet (1933). This first version of Noel Coward's tale of ill-fated lovers was later obscured by the more famous Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy remade from 1940.
Neagle had her first major film success in the title role of Nell Gwynn (1934).
Neagle had her first major success with in Nell Gwyn (1934), which Wilcox had filmed in 1926 as a silent starring Dorothy Gish. Neagle's performance as the woman who became the mistress of Charles II (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) prompted some censorship in the United States. The Hays Office had Wilcox add a (historically false) scene featuring the two leads getting married and also a "framing" story resulting in an entirely different ending. Noted writer Graham Greene said of Nell Gwynn: "I have seen few things more attractive than Miss Neagle in breeches".
Two years after Nell Gwynn, she followed up with another true-life figure, portraying Irish actress Peg Woffington in Peg of Old Drury (1936). That same year she appeared in Limelight, a backstage musical in which she played a chorus girl. Her co-star was Arthur Tracy, who had gained fame in the United States as a radio performer known as "The Street Singer". The film also featured Jack Buchanan in an unbilled cameo performing "Goodnight Vienna".
Neagle and Wilcox followed this film with a circus trapeze fable entitled The Three Maxims (1937), which was released in the United States as The Show Goes On. The film, which boasted a script by Herman Mankiewicz (who later co-wrote Citizen Kane with Orson Welles), had Neagle performing her own high-wire acrobatics.
Although now highly successful in films, Neagle continued act on stage as well. In 1934, while working under director Robert Atkins, she played the roles of Rosalind in As You Like It and Olivia in Twelfth Night. Both productions earned her critical accolades, despite the fact that she had never performed Shakespearean roles before.
Neagle portrayed Queen Victoria in the highly successful Victoria the Great (1937).
In 1937 Neagle gave her most prestigious performance to date – as Queen Victoria in the phenomenally successful historical drama Victoria the Great (1937), co-starring Anton Walbrook as Prince Albert. The script by Robert Vansittart and Miles Malleson (from Laurence Housman’s play Victoria Regina) alternated between the political and the personal lives of the royal couple. The Diamond Jubilee sequence that climaxed the film was shot in Technicolor. Victoria the Great was such an international success that it resulted in Neagle and Walbrook essaying their roles again in an all-Technicolor sequel entitled Sixty Glorious Years (1938), co-starring C. Aubrey Smith as the Duke of Wellington. While the first of these films was in release, Neagle returned to the London stage and entertained audiences with her portrayal of the title role in Peter Pan.
The success of Victoria the Great and Sixty Glorious Years caused Hollywood studios to take notice. As a result, Neagle and Wilcox came to the United States to work for RKO Radio Pictures. Their first American film was Nurse Edith Cavell (1939), a remake of Dawn, a Wilcox silent that starred Sybil Thorndike. In this, still another Neagle performance of a true-life British heroine, she essayed the role of the nurse who was shot by the Germans in World War I for alleged spying. The resulting effort had a significant impact for audiences on the eve of war.
Neagle co-starred with Ray Bolger (right) in Sunny (1941), one of a handful of films that she made in the United States.
In a turnabout from this serious drama, they followed with three musical comedies, all based on once-popular stage plays. The first of these was Irene (1940), co-starring Ray Milland. RKO probably gave the film bigger production values than England could have afforded. It included a Technicolor sequence, which featured Neagle singing the play's most famous song, "Alice Blue Gown".
She followed this film with No, No, Nanette (1940) with Victor Mature, in which she sang "Tea For Two". She then made Sunny (1941) with Ray Bolger.
Neagle and Wilcox's final American film was Forever and a Day (1943), a tale of a London family house from 1804 to the 1940 blitz. This film boasts 80 performers (mostly British), including Ray Milland, C. Aubrey Smith, Claude Rains, Charles Laughton, and – among the few Americans – Buster Keaton. Wilcox directed the sequence featuring Neagle, Milland, Smith, and Rains, while other directors who worked on the film included René Clair, Edmund Goulding, Frank Lloyd, Victor Saville, and Robert Stevenson. During the war the profits and salaries where given to war relief. After the war, prints were slated to be destroyed, so that no one could profit from them. However, this never occurred, leaving the film available for future generations.
Returning to England, Neagle and Wilcox then commenced with They Flew Alone (1942; shot after but released before Forever and a Day). Neagle added another real-life British heroines to her roster, this time as aviatrix Amy Johnson. Robert Newton’s co-starred as Johnson's husband, Jim Mollinson. The film, which was released a year after the aviatrix’s death, was noted for inter-cutting the action with newsreel footage.
Neagle teamed with Richard Greene for the war-time espionage thriller The Yellow Canary (1943).
After making this film, Neagle and Wilcox made their professional relationship a personal one as well when they married on August 9, 1943.
They returned to filmmaking with The Yellow Canary (1943), co-starring Richard Greene and Margaret Rutherford. In this spy story, Neagle plays a German-sympathiser (or at least that is what she seems to be at first) who is forced to go to Canada for her own safety. In reality, of course, she's working as an undercover agent out to expose a plot to blow up Halifax harbour. The Yellow Canary was noted for its atmospheric recreation of wartime conditions.
In 1945 Neagle appeared on stage in Emma, a dramatization of Jane Austen's novel. That same year she was seen in the film I Live in Grosvenor Square, co-starring Rex Harrison. She wanted Harrison for the lead in her next film, Piccadilly Incident (1946). However, he (as well as John Mills) proved to be unavailable at the time, so Wilcox cast Michael Wilding in the lead. Thus was born what film critic Godfrey Winn called "the greatest team in British films". The story – of a wife, presumed dead, returning to her (remarried) husband – bears a resemblance to the Irene Dunne-Cary Grant comedy My Favorite Wife and its remake, Move Over Darling with Doris Day. Piccadilly Incident was chosen as Picturegoer’s Best Film of 1947.
Neagle and Wilding were re-teamed in The Courtneys of Curzon Street (1947), a period drama that became the year's top box-office attraction. The film featured Wilding as an upper-class dandy and Neagle as the maid he marries, only to have the two of them driven apart by Victorian society.
The third teaming of Neagle and Wilding in the "London films", as their series of cinematic pairings came to be called, was in the drama Spring in Park Lane (1948). This one dealt with the romance of a millionaire’s niece in love with a valet (actually a nobleman who has seen better days). The script for the film was written by Nicholas Phipps, who also played Wilding’s brother. Although not a musical, it contains a dream sequence featuring the song "The Moment I Saw You". The song's orchestrator was Robert Farnon, who would later work with Frank Sinatra. Spring in Park Lane was the 1949 Picturegoer winner for Best Film, Actor and Actress.
Neagle and Wilding teamed for a fourth time in the Technicolor romance Maytime in Mayfair (1949). The plot to this one was reminiscent of Roberta, as it had Wilding inheriting a dress shop owned by Neagle.
By 1950 Neagle was at her zenith as Britain’s top box-office actress, and in that year she made what reputedly became her own favorite film, Odette, co-starring Trevor Howard, Peter Ustinov, and Marius Goring. As Odette Sansom, she was the Anglo-French resistance fighter who was pushed to the edge of betrayal by the Nazis.
Going from this real-life British heroine, she went straight on to playing another with The Lady with the Lamp (1951), where she was cast as Florence Nightingale (as had Kay Francis in a 1936 American film, The White Angel).
Neagle appeared with Errol Flynn in Lilacs in the Spring (1954), the film adaptation of her stage success The Glorious Days.
Returning to the stage in 1953, she scored a major success with The Glorious Days, which had a run of 476 performances. Neagle and Wilcox brought the play to the screen under the title Lilacs in the Spring (1954), co-starring Errol Flynn. In the film she plays an actress knocked out by a bomb, who dreams she is Queen Victoria and Nell Gwyn – as well as her own mother. As she begins dreaming, the film switches from black and white to color. In England, where Neagle had top billing, the film was reasonably successful. In the United States, however, where Flynn had top billing, the title was changed to Let's Make Up, and it flopped, with limited bookings.
Neagle and Flynn reteamed for a second flm together, King's Rhapsody (1955), based on an Ivor Novello musical and also starring Patrice Wymore (Flynn's wife at the time). Although Neagle performed several musical numbers for the film, most of them were cut from the final print, leaving her with essentially a supporting role. Shot in Eastmancolor and CinemaScope with location work near Barcelona, Spain, King's Rhapsody was a major flop everywhere. Neagle's (and Flynn's) box-office appeal, it seemed, was beginning to fade.
Neagle's last box-office hit was My Teenage Daughter (1956), which featured her as a mother trying to prevent her daughter (Sylvia Syms) from lapsing into juvenile deliquency.
Neagle and Syms reteamed for No Time For Tears (1957), also starring Anthony Quayle and Flora Robson. This one was directed by Cyril Frankel, thus making it the first film for over 20 years that Neagle appeared in under the direction of someone other than Herbert Wilcox. Set in a children's hospital, the film features Neagle as a Matron dealing with the problems of the patients and the staff, notably a nurse (Syms) infatuated with one of the doctors (George Baker).
With her husband, Neagle began producing films starring Frankie Vaughan, but these were out of touch with changing tastes, and lost money, resulting in Wilcox going heavily into debt. Neagle herself made her final film appearance in The Lady is a Square (1957).
Herbert Wilcox was bankrupt by 1964, but his wife soon revived his fortunes. She returned to the stage the following year and made a spectacular comeback in the West End musical Charlie Girl. In it she played the role of a former "Cochran Young Lady" who marries a peer of the realm. Charlie Girl was a phenomenal success that ran for a staggering six years and 2,047 performances. It earned Neagle an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for her enduring popularity.
Two years after Charlie Girl – which she also performed in Australia and New Zealand – Neagle was asked to appear in a revival of No, No, Nanette, which she had done onscreen three decades earlier. Later, in 1975, she replaced Celia Johnson in The Dame of Sark and, in 1978 (the year after her husband's death), she was acting in Most Gracious Lady, which was written for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Although plagued by Parkinson's disease in her later years, Neagle continued to be active well into her eighties. In 1985 she appeared as the Fairy Godmother in a production of Cinderella at the London Palladium.
Anna Neagle died in 1986 from complications of renal disease and cancer and was laid to rest with her husband and family in the City of London Cemetery.
Neagle was bestowed with the honor of Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1952, and, for her contributions to the theatre, Dame of the British Empire in 1969.
The following list contains all of Neagle's acting credits in feature-length motion pictures with the exception of Queen Victoria (1942), which is actually a compilation of two earlier films, Victoria the Great and Sixty Glorious Years.
All of her films were directed by Herbert Wilcox and produced in the United Kingdom unless otherwise noted.
In addition, Neagle also appeared briefly as herself in a documentary short entitled The Volunteer (1943), and served as narrator for the films The Prams Break Through (1945) and Princess's Wedding Day (1947).
Neagle also produced, but did not star, in three films starring Frankie Vaughan: These Dangerous Years (1957), Wonderful Things (1957), and The Heart of a Man (1959).
Recordings by Anna Neagle
HMV B 4365 (matrix: 0B 4586-3)
Recorded London January 4, 1933
HMV B 4365 (matrix: 4587-4)
Recorded London January 4, 1933
Columbia(England) DB 1316 (matrix: CA 14314-1)
Recorded London January 30, 1934
Decca(England) F 5649 (matrix: TB 1869)
Recorded London August 9, 1935
Decca(England) F 5649 (matrix: TB 1870)
Recorded London August 9, 1935
Autobiography: There's Always Tomorrow (1974): ISBN 0491019416.
