Career
Acting career
The younger sister of silent screen star Priscilla Bonner, she also appeared in several films (spelling her first name Marjorie), among them Cecil B. DeMille"s The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932), and the talkie Cleopatra (1934). By the late 1930s her movie career was over and she was working as a personal assistant to the actress Penny Singleton. Relationship with Malcolm Lowry and writing career
On June 7, 1939, she met British author Malcolm Lowry on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue at the time he had had begun the second draft of Under the Volcano.
Bonner wrote scripts for Canadian Broadcasting Company Radio and worked with Lowry on a screenplay for the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender Is the Night.
She wrote three novels during the 1940s. Two were mystery novels, The Shapes That Creep (1944) and The Last Twist of the Knife (1946) (both "in the vein of Agatha Christie").
A third was "a more ambitious novel about human passions, dreams, and failure", Horse in the Sky (1947). A fourth novel, The Castle of Malatesta, was a psychological novel that remained in manuscript.
She is chiefly remembered for her unsung role in the creation of Lowry"s masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947).
Since Lowry had a tendency toward verbosity, her most frequent editorial comment was "cut". She is widely “considered to be the model for its central female character, the consul"s wife, Yvonne."
After Lowry"s death in 1957, Margerie Bonner returned to Los Angeles and co-edited with Douglas Day the unfinished novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid in 1968, and edited his Psalms and Songs in 1975. = Lowry"s death In 1955 Lowry was persuaded by her to return to Ripe, a small village in Sussex, England, where he died two years later "after a fatal mixture of gin and sodium amytol: the coroner"s verdict was "Death by misadventure.""
"Foul play at White Cottage", an article by biographer Gordon Bowker published in the Times Literary Supplement on 20 February 2004, outlined inconsistencies in the various different accounts of Lowry"s death offered by Margerie.
