Phyllis Calvert | WatchedThis
Phyllis Calvert
Acting
Biography
Phyllis Calvert (18 February 1915 – 8 October 2002) was an English film, stage and television actress. Born Phyllis Hannah Bickle in Chelsea, she trained at the Margaret Morris School of Dancing and performed from the age of ten, gaining her first film role at the age of 12, in The Arcadians (1927), also known as The Land of Heart's Desire. Calvert performed in repertory theatre and in several films, before making her London stage debut in A Woman's Privilege in 1939. During the following decade, she starred in many romances, including Fanny by Gaslight, with James Mason and Stewart Granger, and My Own True Love, becoming one of Britain's highest paid stars. However, three Hollywood studios failed to pay her what she asked. She first found success in the film adaptation of H. G. Wells' Kipps (1941), but it was The Man in Grey (1943) that confirmed her status. She acted in over 40 films, her later films include Oh! What a Lovely War and The Walking Stick. Calvert had already appeared on television, playing Mrs. March in the 1958 serials Little Women and Good Wives (both adapted from Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women), as well as individual episodes of several other programmes, when, in 1970, she landed the part of an agony aunt with problems of her own in Kate. She made TV appearances in programmes such as Crown Court, Ladykillers, Tales of the Unexpected, Boon, After Henry and The Line Grove Story. She was married to the actor and antiquarian bookseller Peter Murray Hill, with whom she had two children, Ann Auriol (born 1943) and Piers Auriol (born 1954). She died in London in 2002, from natural causes, aged 87.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Indiscreet
Anna Kalman is an accomplished actress who has given up hope of finding the man of her dreams. While talking about this subject with her sister, in walks Philip Adams and she realizes that this is the charming, smart, and handsome man she has been waiting for.
Appointment with Danger
Al Goddard, a detective who works for the United States Postal Inspection Service, is assigned to arrest two criminals who've allegedly murdered a U.S. postal detective.
Two Thousand Women
During the Second World War, three downed English airmen hide out with women's internment camp in France.
The Man in Grey
After marrying a dour and disinterested lord for status, a young woman falls in love with a stage actor while her best friend from boarding school enters an affair with her husband.
Mr. Denning Drives North
When well-off aircraft designer Denning finds his daughter's current boyfriend is a nasty character he tries to buy him off, ending up hitting him and causing his death when he falls. Instead of calling the police he dumps the body in a lonely spot on the road to the North, making it look like a hit-and-run accident. Weeks later there is still no report of the body being found, and Denning starts to go to pieces. When he lets his wife into his secret the two start making enquiries, possibly making things worse.
Mandy
London, the early 1950s. Born deaf, Mandy is mute for most of her childhood. As she reaches school age her family itself is in danger of breaking up. Christine, Mandy's mother, has heard of a residential school for the oral education of the deaf.
Madonna of the Seven Moons
In the early part of this century, Maddelena a teenage Italian girl, is attacked whilst walking in the woods. The attack leaves her mentally scarred and our story flashes forward to the 1940s where Maddelena is still troubled. She disappears one day and her daughter vows to find her.
Twisted Nerve
Martin Durnley is a young man with an infantilizing mother, resentful stepfather and an institutionalized brother with Down's syndrome. To cope, he retreats into an alternate child personality he calls Georgie. After being caught during a theft attempt at a department store, he befriends a female customer who is sympathetic to him, but his friendship soon turns into obsession.
My Own True Love
Following World War II, a woman tries to help her fiance understand his son's traumatic experience as a G.I., during which he lost a leg and was imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp.
All Passion Spent
his three-part miniseries begins with elderly Lady Slane (Wendy Hiller) sitting watchfully by the deathbed of her husband. Tended by her equally aged French maid Genoux (Eileen Way), who has served her faithfully for a lifetime, Lady Slane deals with a succession of advice from her large flock of middle-aged children. The family is chagrined by, but honors, her choice to live a modest country retirement at some distance, in Hampstead Heath. Lady Slane competently comes to terms to lease and restore a crumbling house, aided by an aging land agent Gervase Bucktrout (Maurice Denham). Once settled, an acquaintance from 50 years past, Mr. Fitzgeorge (Harry Andrews), visits the cottage to rekindle memories of their brief, deep, but unfulfilled brush as soul-mates in colonial India when Lady Slane was a devoted young wife and mother. Great-granddaughter Deborah (Jane Snowden), who has been trapped by a socially desirable but passionless engagement, regularly visits to confide and seek wisdom.
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