Background
Margaret Lockwood was born on 15 September 1916 in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan.
Margaret Lockwood was born on 15 September 1916 in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan.
Educated at Sydenham High School for girls, and a ladies' school in Kensington, London.
She had worked on stage first, but the camera clearly loved her: Some Day (35, Michael Powell); Midshipman Easy (35, Reed); Man of the Moment (35, Monty Banks); Annie Ridd in Lorna Doone (35, Basil Dean); Honours Easy (35, Herbert Brenon); The Case of Gabriel Perry (35, Albert de Courville); The Amateur Gentleman (36, Thornton Freeland); The Beloved Vagabond (36, Curt Bernhardt); Jury’s Evidence (36, Ralph Ince); Irish for Luck (36, Arthur Wood); with George Arliss in Doctor Syn (37, Roy William Neill); Who’s Your Lady Friend? (37, Reed); The Street Singer (37, Jean de Marguerat); Melody and Romance (37, Maurice Elvey); Oicd Bob (38, Robert Stevens); Bank Holiday (38, Reed).
What’s more, she did go to Hollywood. At the very moment in question, she was invited west for two pictures: Rulers of the Sea (39, Frank Lloyd), with Doug Fairbanks Jr., and Susannah of the Mounties (39, William A. Seiter), with Shirley Temple. Yet there’s no evidence that Selznick knew of her.
She came back to Britain and did her best work in the war years: The Stars Look Down (39, Reed); A Girl Must Live (39, Reed); Night Train to Munich (40, Reed); Quiet Wedding (40, Anthony Asquith); Alibi (42, Brian Desmond Hurst); The Man in Grey (43, Leslie Arliss), with James Mason; Give Us the Moon (43, Val Guest); Dear Octopus (43, Harold French); A Place of One’s Own (44, Bernard Knowles); Love Story (44, Arliss); and her big hit, with Mason, as highwaymen, The Wicked Lady (45, Arliss)—a very Scarlett role.
She was only thirty, but af ter the war she failed to attach herself to Rank or Ealing and her career suffered: III Be Your Sweetheart (45, Guest); Bedelia (46, Lance Comfort); Hungry Hill (47, Hurst); The White Unicorn (47, Knowles); Jassy (47, Knowles); a TV version of Pygmalion in 1948; Look Before You Love (48, Harold Huth); as Nell Gwynn in Cardboard Cavalier (49, Walter Forde); Madness of the Heart (49, Charles Bennett); Highly Dangerous (50, Roy Baker); and then three pictures for Herbert Wilcox—Trent’s Last Case (52), Trouble in the Glen (53), and Laughing Anne (53).
She was doing stage again, and had a last movie fling in Cast a Dark Shadow (57, Lewis Gilbert), placing with Dirk Bogarde. Thereafter, it was just TV series—sometimes with her daughter, Julia— and the stepmother in The Slipper and the Rose (76, Bryan Forbes).
Lockwood looked a lot like Leigh; she looked as much like Joan Bennett (who was also in the running); she would have been twenty-two when Scarlett was cast—and she might have been pretty good, to judge bv her several performances for Carol Reed in the late thirties and early forties, or to judge simply by Hitchcock's The Lady Van-ishes (38), a better calling card than anvthing Vivien Leigh could muster. Of course, Leigh had Olivier and Myron Selznick—she got herself there in the firelight of Atlanta. But Margaret Lockwood was plainly a favorite of Carol Reed.
Still, it’s an intriguing call, and enough to remind us that Margaret Lockwood had her moment as a woman of spirit, pride, and even danger.