Background
Anna Neagle was born on 20 October 1904 in London, City of London, United Kingdom.
Anna Neagle was born on 20 October 1904 in London, City of London, United Kingdom.
Educated at primary school in Glasgow and then St Albans High School for Girls.
She was a dancer originally and then one of Charles Cochrans young ladies. After small parts in Should a Doctor Tell? (30, 11. Manning Havnes) and The Chinese Bungalow (31, J. B. Williams), Herbert Wilcox costarred her with Jack Buchanan in his film of Goodnight Vienna (32). He did not marry her until 1943, but he was in doting charge of her career thereaf ter and directed nearly all her films: The Flag Lieutenant (33, Harrs' Edwards); The Little Damozel (33); Bitter Sweet (33); The Queen’s Affair (34); a great success as a very girlish Nell Gwynn (34); followed by Peg of Old Drury (35).
It comes as something of a shock years later to realize that Miss Neagle is probably essaving Restoration and Ilogarthian sex in those films, and that the other characters, chiefly Cedric Hardwicke, respond as if she was succeeding. Her next films were musicals: Limelight (36), The Three Maxims (36), and London Melody (37). At this point, Wilcox took advantage of the new freedom to present Queen Victoria and delivered a decorous one-two to the soft British belly of sentimental patriotism: Victoria the Great (37) and Sixty Glorious Years (38). (If Hitler saw those films it might explain his eager hustling toward the brink of war. Though in her next film, Nurse Edith Cavell [39], Miss Neagle gave warning of the severity of welfare services.)
Miss Neagle and Wilcox did go to Hollywood during the darkest days: Irene (40); No, No Nanette (40), with Victor Mature; Sunny (41); and an episode from Forever and a Day (43). She returned to London to play Amy Johnson in They Flew Alone (42) and The Yellow Canary (43). After the war she began to map out the arbors of chivalry that might exist in a blitzed, black market London: I Live in Grosvenor Square (45), Piccadilly Incident (46), and so on, by way of Curzon Street, Park Lane, and Mayfair—a purple patch in the Monopoly of love and idleness, with Michael Wilding as the male object. But after Elizabeth of Lady mead (49), she took on sterner things in the rather grisly Odette (50). Her healing vocation was recalled as Florence Nightingale in The Lady with the Lamp (51).
Her time was nearly up, but she carried on blithely in Derby Day (52); Lilacs in the Spring (54); King’s Rhapsody (55)—the latter two in the unsuitable company of a declining Errol Flynn— My Teenage Daughter (56); No Time for Tears (57); The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk (58); and The Lady Is a Square (59). That was her last film, and for it she “discovered” Frankie Vaughan, a cruel test of the affection of her admirers but one that she apparently weathered. Charlie Girl played to full houses for some five years, with Dame Anna’s admirers being bused in from the Midlands by charabanc.