Mary Merrall

Mary Merrall (5 January 1890 – 31 August 1973), born Elsie Lloyd, was an English actress whose career of over 60 years encompassed stage, film and television work. Stage career Merrall's stage career started in her teens, making her first stage appearance in 1907, as Queenie Merrall, and for the rest of her life she remained a well-known and respected stage actress. Although she was based in London, she often appeared in other prestigious venues in the UK such as the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Theatre Royal, Glasgow. Among her most famous stage roles were Lady Macbeth in a controversial but influential 1928 modern-dress production by Barry Jackson which opened in Birmingham before transferring to London's Royal Court Theatre, and Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca at the Strand Theatre in 1940. Her stage career also took her to the United States, where she appeared in Canaries Sometimes Sing (Frederick Lonsdale) in New York and Chicago in 1930. Film and television With the exception of an appearance in a 1932 quota quickie Men of Steel, Merrall did not make the move into films until the 1940s. She was given leading roles in the 1940 Irish-set drama Dr. O'Dowd (now classed as a lost film) and the film adaptation of Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole the following year. The 1940s then brought a steady stream of good film parts including her best-remembered roles as Mrs. Foley in the 1945 classic Dead of Night and Mrs. Nickleby in the Alberto Cavalcanti-directed 1947 screen version of Nicholas Nickleby. Into the 1950s Merrall also landed a string of diverse roles in films such as Encore (1951), prison drama The Weak and the Wicked (1954), comedy The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954) and harrowing World War II drama The Camp on Blood Island (1958).