Background
Madeleine Carroll was born on 26 February 1906 in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, United Kingdom.
Madeleine Carroll was born on 26 February 1906 in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, United Kingdom.
The first English rose transplanted to America, Madeleine Carroll had all the regal beauty of the English leading lady and nothing that a dozen others did not share. But in the early 1930s she was so popular in England that her reception in Hollywood established a model to aim at for women in the English cinema.
Twenty years after she left England, and ten years after her career had petered out, British cinema admired the fragrance and bloom of Virginia McKenna—the same bush in flower. Carroll made her debut in The Guns of Loos (28, Sinclair Hill) and quickly rose to British stardom: Atlantic (29, E. A. Dupont); Young Woodley (30, Thomas Bentley); Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal (30, Maurice Èlvey); Fascination (31, Miles Mander); I Was a Spy (33, Motor Saville), the latter after a stately retirement to mark marriage—the first of four. Fox invited her to America for The World Moves On (34. John Ford), but it was her two films for Hitchcock that added a little spice to blondeness—even if no other director ever detected it. She was hand-cuffed to Robert Donat in The Thirty-nine Steps (35), and plainly frightened by Peter Lorre in The Secret Agent (36). America then took her up: The General Died at Dawn (36, Lewis Milestone); Lloyds of London (36, Henry King); On the Avenue (37, Hoy del Ruth); It’s All Yours (37, Elliott Nugent); The Prisoner of Zenda (37, John Cromwell); Blockade (38, William Dieterle); Cafe Society (39, Edward H. Griffith); Honeymoon in Bali (39, Griffith); Virginia (40, Griffith), with another husband, Sterling Hayden; My Son, My Son! (40, Charles Vidor); Safari (40, Griffith); North West Mounted Police (40, Cecil B. De Mille); One Night in Lisbon (41, Griffith); and Bahama Passage (41, Griffith).
She worked for the Red Cross during the war and returned only for White Cradle Inn (46, Harold French), Don’t Trust Your Husband (48, Lloyd Bacon), and a rather meek Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan (49, Otto Preminger).