Margaretta Scott
Actress Margaretta Scott died last April 15. She was 93.
Although the London-born actress (on Feb. 13, 1912) is best known today for her role as Mrs. Pumphrey in the television series All Creatures Great and Small, Scott had what Michael Coveney in The Guardian described as a “distinguished career [that] spanned 70 years of theatre and film and, as the last surviving signatory of the document that established Equity, the British actors’ union, in 1934, she was highly regarded in her profession.”
Onstage, Scott worked with Tyrone Guthrie and Alec Guinness at the Old Vic, with George Bernard Shaw at the 1934 premiere of Androcles and the Lion, and in 1958 she played Gertrude opposite Peter O’Toole’s first Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic. She was reportedly the first woman to appear in Shakespeare on television. (The Guardian article says her first TV Shakespeare was in the role of Portia in The Merchant of Venice in 1947, though the IMDb lists Scott as Beatrice in a stage production of Much Ado About Nothing broadcast by the BBC in 1937.)
On film, she had an important role (as dual characters Roxana / Rowena) in Alexander Korda’s film adaptation of H. G. Wells‘ Things to Come (1936), directed by William Cameron Menzies, and starring Raymond Massey (see picture). She could also be seen in Carol Reed’s Girl in the News (1941), starring Margaret Lockwood; Anthony Asquith’s comedy Quiet Wedding (1940), also with Lockwood; and Asquith’s popular melodrama Fanny by Gaslight (1944), starring Phyllis Calvert and James Mason. Scott also appeared in numerous television productions.
She was the widow of composer John Wooldridge, who died in a car accident at the age of 39 in 1958.
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