Person Page - 768

Filmography

The Ghost Train (1931), Peggy Murdock
The Water Gipsies (1932), Jane Bell
The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934), Phyllis Drummond
Things to Come (1936), Mary Gordon
Action for Slander (1937), Ann Daviot
The Squeaker (1937), Carol Stedman
South Riding (1938), Midge Carne
Black Magic (1938) (TV), Mary Chalfont
The Old and the Young (1938) (TV), ?
Ann and Harold TV series - unknown episodes, (1938), Ann Teviot
Tower of London (1939), Princess - uncredited
Poison Pen (1939), Ann Rider
How Green Was My Valley (1941), Ceinwen
Danny Boy (1941), Jane Kaye
Ships with Wings (1942), Kay Gordon
Perfect Strangers (1945), Elena
The Seventh Veil (1945), Francesca
Gaiety George (1946), Kathryn Davis
The Paradine Case (1947), Gay Keane
Daybreak (1948), Frankie
So Evil My Love (1948), Olivia Harwood
The Passionate Friends (1949), Mary Justin
Madeleine (1950), Madeleine Smith
The Sound Barrier (1952), Susan Garthwaite
BBC Sunday Night Theatre: Tovarich (1954) (TV), Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna
The Green Scarf (1954), Solange Vauthier
The Alcoa Hour TV series - One episode: "The Black Wings" (1955), Jane Cornish
The United States Steel Hour TV series - One episode: "Edward My Son" (1955), Evelyn Holt
Time Without Pity (1957), Honor Stanford
Climax TV series - One episode: Shadow of a Memory (1957), Jane Palmer
General Electric Theater TV series - One episode: "Letters from Cairo" (1958), Cynthia Spence
Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series - One episode: "Sylvia" (1958), Sylvia Leeds Kent
The Offshore Island (1959) (TV), Rachel Verney
Playhouse 90 TV series - Two episodes: "The Grey Nurse Said Nothing" (1959), Laura Mills; "Not the glory" (1958), Lady Diane Goodfellow
Taste of Fear (1961), Jane Appleby
Thriller TV series - One episode: "Letter to a lover" (1961), Sylvia Lawrence
Figlio del capitano Blood II[Son of Captain Blood] (1962), Arabella Blood opposite Errol Flynn's son Sean
Ninety Degrees in the Shade (1965), Mrs Kurka
Armchair Theatre (TV series) - Two episodes: "Ready for Glory" (1966), Lady Baynton; "The Lady of Camellias" (1958), Marguerite Gautier
Thirty Minute Theatre TV series - One episode: "The keys on the streets" (1967), ?
The Fiend (1972), Birdy Wemys
The Human Factor (1979), Castle’s mother
Maelstrom (1985), Astrid Linderman
The McGuffin (1986), Mrs Forbes-Duthie
Maigret - One episode, "The Patience of Maigret" (1992), Mlle Josette.³

     Lady Marguerite Tangye, who has died aged 89, was considered the most beautiful girl in Society in the 1930s and led a dramatic and unconventional life.
     As one of the most glamorous debutantes before the war, Lady Marguerite was like a pop star. She had her portrait taken by the best photographers, featured in advertisements for Pond's cream and, although she did not smoke, Will's Gold Flake ("The Man's Cigarette that Women Like") and sang swing at the Coq Rouge night-club in New York. Her three marriages were front page news, as was: "Earl's Daughter Sprains Ankle".
     Though born into the aristocracy, Lady Marguerite was determined to work for a living. After her third marriage, in 1951, to Nigel Tangye, she helped him establish an admired hotel at Glendorgal, his seaside home near Newquay. She did the dusting herself, made the beds, sat behind the bar serving drinks (although she herself drank little) and in the evening sang along to visiting jazz musicians.
     When this marriage was dissolved in 1963, she moved into a bed-sitting room in Earls Court and embraced bohemian London, frequenting Muriel Belcher's Colony Room and Annabel's (dressed in a tweed suit), pursued by young admirers. She developed a love of football, going to watch Chelsea play at Stamford Bridge; she made sculpted heads of George Best and Kevin Keegan, and stuck World Cup posters on her kitchen wall.
     She never had much money, but never complained, having no interest in material possessions. Her free spirit stemmed from an unfettered and adventure-filled childhood.
     She was born Marguerite Rose Bligh in London on April 24 1913, the daughter of Lord Clifton, later the 9th Earl of Darnley, of Cobham Hall, Kent; painter, musician, flower breeder, pacifist and, at 6ft 7in, the tallest member of the peerage.
     Marguerite's grandfather, the 8th Earl, had (as Ivo Bligh) captained the victorious English cricket team which toured Australia in the winter of 1882-83 and brought home an urn purporting to contain "the ashes of English cricket".
     Her parents separated when she was three (they divorced in 1920) and Marguerite and her brother Peter moved with their mother Daphne to live with her parents, Alfred and Mabel Mulholland, at Worlingham Hall, Beccles, Suffolk. There Mabel Mulholland would produce vegetarian food, which her husband, "Dada", would wolf down, then sneek off to Lowestoft yacht club for a steak.
     Worlingham was soon besieged by hopeful suitors, among them "the most gorgeously good-looking dark young man in khaki" (as Marguerite recalled). This was Hugo Chandor, an old Etonian sheep farmer recently returned from the Argentine. He soon married Daphne and whisked them all away to live in a wooden house with an earth floor at Tres Barras, 600 miles into the interior of Brazil, to build a sawmill.
     There were no shops and no telephone, and following a revolution in Sao Paulo they were cut off completely for six months. "Rats fought under my bed at night," Lady Marguerite recalled, "and the house was crawling with insects and spiders. None of us minded this in the least." Her sanguine outlook she attributed to the influence of her mother, a Christian Scientist who held that "you should only think and talk about the happy things".
     After five years they returned to England, Daphne having been poisoned by drinking water from the well, which had dead toads in it. They went back to Worlingham, where Marguerite was soon indulging in short-lived horseplay with the village boys.
     "I used to play with the cook's son who was called Eddie," she recalled. "One day my mother came round the corner of the shrubbery and saw Eddie, who'd just tackled me, playing rugby, lying on top of me and she said, 'You mustn't let the cook's son lie on top of you like that.' And I think at that moment she thought it was time at 13 that I was sent to school."
     She only boarded at Belsted for two years, however, and though naturally bright she later regretted her lack of formal education.
     Lady Marguerite was presented at Court in 1931 and began the round of deb dances at which she drank only milk and found much of the male company on offer rather dull. She did, though, soon become involved with a stockbroker called Claud Strickland.
     Before they married in 1934, she recalled "we used to go sailing and we would drive up from the boat, very tired and very sleepy, get into a pub . . . and there would be sex and sausages and beans in bed. We really enjoyed ourselves. If you've a woman who is all right in night-clubs and sophisticated in the week, and will rough it at the weekends, that's a man's ideal really."
     After honeymooning in Hawaii they returned to live in Duke Street, St James's, and, as Lady Marguerite later recalled, ate at home once during the course of the next four years. Her tall, dark, lustrous looks brought her work as a mannequin at Fortnum & Mason and her picture was taken by Baron (who credited her "Madonna-like smile" with relaxing him at the outset of his career), Angus McBean, Norman Parkinson, Beauchamp, and Horst, among many others. The painting of her by Gerald Brockhurst, entitled Over the Hills, achieved the top price at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1939.
     Among Lady Marguerite's advertisements was one for Evan Williams "The Aristocrat of Shampoos". "I am delighted to have discovered it," she was quoted as saying. And on Kirbigrips: "They grip all the time - whether I am rushing around out of doors or dressed up in the evening. One must, of course, insist on genuine Kirbigrips."
     On the eve of war, her father Lord Darnley was passing through Piccadilly Circus with the chairman of the maker of Horlicks, when they saw the first of the huge advertisements there. "That's my advertisement," the chairman said. "That's my daughter," said Lord Darnley.
     Lady Marguerite appeared in various plays in repertory and had a screen test for Hollywood. But she was equally exercised by her work for animals, being a member of the Animal Defence League, and travelling to Algiers to help rescue sick and maltreated animals with her Sicilian friend Marie Ruperto.
     A lifelong vegetarian, Lady Marguerite's feelings about animals were intensified by the experience of having her Alsatian, Saxon, stolen while walking him in Regent's Park. To add insult to injury, she was then blackmailed by the thieves, who arranged to meet her at Baker Street station and give him back in return for a £3 ransom.
     On the outbreak of war, anticipating an invasion of the east coast, Lady Marguerite and her friend Rosemary Potter (soon to be her father's third wife) took a carthorse and polo pony from Worlingham to a safer billet in Gloucestershire - the journey (with fodder on board) taking nine days.
     By this time she was separated from her first husband and was sharing a flat with Nebbie Dimovic, the artist Feliks Topolski and Baron Nahum, the photographer. She served in the MTC, teaching soldiers how to dismantle engines, but was dismissed after Baron took her photograph without a hair net. She later served as an ambulance driver in the Blitz, showing no fear.
     In 1942 she married her second husband, Gordon Haywood, a Spitfire pilot of the Tiger Squadron, and the next year they had twins, Lucinda and Gareth.
     When her second marriage ended in 1951, Lady Marguerite went to live at St Ives, where Baron introduced her to Nigel Tangye, whose previous wife, the actress Ann Todd, had left him for David Lean. Their honeymoon consisted of a motorbike trip to southern Europe, with Lady Marguerite riding pillion.
     After their divorce and her move to London, Lady Marguerite did a variety of jobs, working at the Post Office in a late shift at Christmas and as a query clerk at Harrods, alongside Jennifer Paterson.
     Having found the world of debs restrictive, Lady Marguerite loved her new bohemian life. She kept a caravan at Henley and became so fond of sleeping in it that she later constructed a caravan-like box in the cluttered bedroom of her small flat in Redcliffe Gardens, which the Darnley Trust enabled her to buy in 1982, and where she lived for the rest of her life, surrounded by scrapbooks and photographs of her pin-ups - Gary Lineker, Bruce Willis, Rod Stewart, etcetera.
     She had no interest in politics but admired Michael Heseltine for his "beautiful hair". She herself kept her looks well into her seventies, and always had a great sense of style. In her younger days she had designed and made her own clothes, and even during her last days in hospital wore a leopardskin jacket, corduroy cap and chunky rings on her fingers.
     She was, though, brave and humorous about getting older, once asking a suitor who wished to rekindle the flame: "Can't you do better than a pensioner?" She had a wonderful laugh, which embarrassed some and delighted others.
     Despite her party days, and apparently outgoing nature, Lady Marguerite was in some ways curiously shy, and therefore selective - though never snobbish - about whom she mixed with.
     She died on October 10 and is survived by her son and daughter.

     Raleigh Trevelyan
     Wednesday, 6 November 1996

     In the early 1950s Derek Tangye and his wife Jeannie were walking along the cliffs near Lamorna, above Mount's Bay in Cornwall, when they saw a buzzard drifting overhead.

     "Suddenly we saw below it in the distance a small grey cottage on the edge of a wood. It was as grey as the boulders heaped haphazardly around it, as grey as the ancient stone hedges which guarded long forgotten meadows. This was Minack. We knew at the instant of seeing it that it was to become our home".

     The quotation is from A Cornish Summer (1970), the seventh in a series of autobiographical books, all bestsellers and describing their life in that cottage, their early struggles on a flower farm, and their love for the wild landscape and their various animals, that has become known as the "Minack Chronicles". The 19th, The Confusion Room, was published this year.

     Friends in London had been amazed that this good-looking and sophisticated couple should take such a plunge. Derek had worked in Fleet Street as a gossip columnist on the Express and elsewhere. Jeannie had been an agony aunt on the Mirror and had been press officer for the Savoy Hotel Group, which inspired her book Meet Me at the Savoy, published under her maiden name Jean Nicol, and also a bestseller. Their friends included Danny Kaye, David Milford Haven, the photographer Baron, Beverley Nichols, A.P. Herbert, Noel Coward and Tyrone Power; also, surprisingly perhaps, George Brown, the future Foreign Secretary. It is said that when Jeannie came down the stairs at the Savoy the orchestra would strike up with the tune "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair".

     Derek Tangye had Cornish ancestry and had spent happy childhood holidays at his family home at Glendorgal, near Newquay. He had always admired a house called Boskenna at Lamorna, but when he took Jeannie to see it they decided that a simple cottage was really their ideal. Minack, or Dorminack, was certainly simple when they moved in, with an earth floor, no water and electricity, a mile down a bumpy muddy track. However they still returned once or twice a year to London, where they took a luxurious suite first at the Savoy, then at Claridges.

     In 1961 Tangye published A Girl on the Roof, which was a great success. He and Jeannie had been adopted by a succession of cats - notably Monty and Lama - which became the heroes (or heroines) of subsequent books. A Drake at the Door (1963) was so named because of a pet Muscovy duck named Boris (after Pasternak), and A Donkey in the Meadow (1965) was in honour of Fred, a donkey rescued from the knacker's yard.

     The books were illustrated by Jeannie, and nearly all were serialised in popular illustrated magazines. The fan mail grew. The Tangyes' romantic story struck a chord with many who felt that they longed to escape from the stresses of modern life. There were also pilgrimages of admirers, mostly unsolicited.

     In spite of all this Derek Tangye constantly needed reassurance, as I discovered when I was his publisher. He was touchy about the promotion of other bestselling writers on country matters - Gavin Maxwell, for example, or James Herriot (tricky for us, at Michael Joseph, as Herriot was also one of our authors). He was afraid of missing out on new readers and in each book would in some way recapitulate the story of how Jeannie came to Dorminack, and then go on to the previous years' adventures which could be a shipwreck, swallows nesting for the first time under the eaves, or a gala at Lamorna village.

     After I had left Michael Joseph, I used to be invited to a special post-Christmas lunch at Dorminack. The big fire blazed and the cottage would be strung with hundreds of cards from all over the world, champagne flowed and we ate in a miniature conservatory watched by donkeys from the hedge above, maybe also with a gull on the roof. Jeannie was a very good cook and baked her own bread. She died suddenly in 1986, and Derek tried for two years afterwards to keep up the tradition of these lunches. It became too much for him, and he could not be persuaded to resume them at our house, at the other end of Cornwall. Indeed, after Jeannie's death he scarcely left his patch, as he called it, except for a yearly excursion to Claridges in the old tradition.

     Jeannie's funeral was made especially memorable by an address by John Le Carre. Derek also spoke of her on the television programme Songs of Praise in 1992, and many of us were moved to tears when Baron's photograph of her beautiful face appeared as if from the clouds. Derek's book about her, Jeannie (1986), also part of the "Minack Chronicles", I consider to be his best. Some time before they had bought several acres of meadow sloping down to the sea, looking out to St Michael's Mount, and when she was dying they decided to form it into a trust, the Minack Chronicles Trust, as a place for solitude and preserving natural life.

     The possibility of a television series based on the books kept Derek Tangye buoyed up in his last years, when he became increasingly crippled by arthritis and gout. This and the extraordinary flow of admirers who continued to make the pilgrimage and wade through the stream known as Monty's Leap.

     Derek Alan Trevithick Tangye, writer and journalist: born London 29 February 1912; married 1943 Jeannie Nicol (died 1986); died 26 October 1996.

     1941: Time Was Mine. London: Hutchinson
     1942: Went the Day Well; edited by Derek Tangye with contributions from many writers. London: Harrap
     --ditto.--(Reissued in 1995 by Michael Joseph, with subtitle: "tributes to men and women who died for freedom when Britain stood alone in the first two years of the Second World War".)
     1944: One King: a survey of the dominions and colonies of the British empire. London: Harrap
     1961: A Gull on the Roof. London: Michael Joseph
     1962: A Cat in the Window. London: Michael Joseph (American ed. has title: Monty: biography of a marmalade cat.)
     1963: A Drake at the Door. London: Michael Joseph
     1965: A Donkey in the Meadow. London: Michael Joseph
     1966: Lama. London: Michael Joseph
     1968: The Way to Minack. London: Michael Joseph ISBN 0-7221-8366-6
     1970: A Cornish Summer London: Michael Joseph ISBN 0-7181-0041-7
     1972: Cottage on a Cliff. London: Michael Joseph
     1974: A Cat Affair London: Michael Joseph ISBN 0-7181-1287-3
     1976: Sun on the Lintel. London: Michael Joseph
     1978: The Winding Lane. London: Michael Joseph ISBN 0-7221-8392-5
     1980: When the Winds Blow. London: Michael Joseph
     1982: The Ambrose Rock. London: Michael Joseph
     1984: A Quiet Year. London: Michael Joseph
     1986: The Cherry Tree: the new Minack chronicle; an autobiography London: Michael Joseph
     1988: Jeannie: a love story. London: Michael Joseph
     1990: The Evening Gull. London: Michael Joseph
     1993: Monty's Leap. London: Michael Joseph
     1996: The Confusion Room. London: Michael Joseph.