Margaretta Scott (Actress) Movies

Margaretta Scott (actress): Her show business career spanned seven decades on the stage (often in Shakespearean plays), in films, and on television.

Margaretta Scott (actress): Seven-decade show business career spanned Shakespeare, Wells, and All Creatures Great and Small

Best remembered as the eccentric, wealthy widow Mrs. Pumphrey – she of the pampered Pekingese Tricki Woo – in the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small, Margaretta Scott was seen in a whole array of roles on stage, in film, and on TV over the course of seven decades.

On the British stage, Scott was a well-regarded Shakespearean actress (e.g., Queen Gertrude in Hamlet), while on the big screen she is probably best remembered for the 1936 transfer of H.G. Wells’ futuristic sociopolitical drama Things to Come.

Below is a brief overview of Margaretta Scott’s show business career.

Stage

Margaretta Scott made her stage debut at age 14 as Mercutio’s page in a 1926 production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the Strand Theatre (now the Novello Theatre) in London’s West End.

Notable theatrical appearances include:

•  Lavinia in a 1934 production of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, with Andrew Leigh and George Carr as the title characters. (Also featuring future Academy Award winner Greer Garson [Mrs. Miniver, 1942] as an extra.)
• Rosaline in a 1936 production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Old Vic, with Michael Redgrave, Alec Clunes, Alec Guinness, and Rachel Kempson working under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie.
• Two decades later, Queen Gertrude opposite Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic in 1958.

According to theater critic Michael Coveney in The Guardian, Margaretta Scott was also the first woman to costar in a televised Shakespeare play: As Portia in a 1947 production of The Merchant of Venice. (Ten years earlier, the BBC had aired a 10-minute sequence from Much Ado About Nothing, featuring Scott as Beatrice.)

Margaretta Scott movies

Margaretta Scott’s most notable film appearance is probably as the dual characters Roxana and Rowena in producer Alexander Korda’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ sci-fier Things to Come, directed by future Gone with the Wind production designer William Cameron Menzies, and starring Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, and Ralph Richardson.

During World War II, Scott landed supporting roles in a handful of major titles:

• Carol Reed’s thriller The Girl in the News (1940), starring Margaret Lockwood and Barry K. Barnes.
• Anthony Asquith’s comedy Quiet Wedding (1941), starring Lockwood and Derek Farr.
• Walter Forde’s historical drama Atlantic Ferry (1941), starring Michael Redgrave and Valerie Hobson.
• Asquith’s popular melodrama Fanny by Gaslight (1944), starring Phyllis Calvert and James Mason.

Scott’s last feature film role was as Antonia Ellis’ mother in Ralph Thomas’ 1971 comedy Percy, starring Hywel Bennett.

Television

Aside from All Creatures Great and Small, Margaretta Scott’s television work included dozens of series and specials, among them Richard the Lionheart, The Duchess of Duke Street, and Charles Jarrott’s all-star TV movie The Woman He Loved (1988), with Anthony Andrews as the Prince of Wales and Jane Seymour as Wallis Simpson.

In addition, Scott was Catherine de Medici in the miniseries Elizabeth R (1971), starring Glenda Jackson as Queen Elizabeth I. (The miniseries had five different directors.)

Scott’s last appearance in front of the camera was as the formidable Lady Clinton-Smyth (“We in our class have a duty to set an example”) in Roy Battersby’s period miniseries The Moth (1997), starring Jack Davenport.

Equity signatory

In The Guardian, Michael Coveney also asserts that Margaretta Scott was “highly regarded in her profession” for being “the last surviving signatory of the document that established Equity, the British actors’ union, in 1934.” (Note: Equity was established in 1930.)

Coveney adds that Scott was “tireless in her support of charity organizations, including the Actors Charitable Trust.”

Personal life

Margaretta Scott was the widow of composer John Wooldridge (Rx for Murder / Prescription for Murder), who died at age 39 in a car accident in 1958.

The couple had two children: Actress Susan Woolridge (Best Supporting Actress BAFTA winner for Hope and Glory, 1987) and theater director Hugh Woolridge.

Margaretta Scott filmography

Below is the list of Margaretta Scott’s feature films

1934 Dirty Work … Leonora Stafford
1934 The Private Life of Don Juan … Pepilla (uncredited)
1935 Peg of Old Drury … Kitty Clive
1936 Things to Come … Roxana/Rowena
1937 Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel … Theresa Cobarrus
1937 Action for Slander … Josie Bradford
1940 The Girl in the News … Judith Bentley
1941 Quiet Wedding … Marcia
1941 Atlantic Ferry … Susan Donaldson
1942 Sabotage at Sea … Jane Dighton
1944 Fanny by Gaslight … Alicia
1945 The Man from Morocco … Manuela
1947 Mrs. Fitzherbert … Lady Jersey
1948 Counterblast … Sister “Johnnie” Johnson
1948 The Story of Shirley Yorke … Alison Gwynne
1948 Idol of Paris … Empress Eugenie
1948 The First Gentleman … Lady Hartford
1948 Calling Paul Temple … Mrs. Trevellyan
1949 Landfall … Mrs. Burnaby
1952 Where’s Charley? … Dona Lucia
1956 The Last Man to Hang? … Mrs. Cranshaw
1957 The Scamp … Mrs. Blundell
1957 Town on Trial … Helen Dixon
1958 A Woman Possessed … Katherine Winthrop
1960 An Honourable Murder … Claudia Caesar
1970 Crescendo … Danielle Ryman
1971 Percy … Rita’s Mother

Endnotes

Greer Garson’s appearance in the 1934 production of Androcles and the Lion is mentioned in Michael Troyan’s A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Life of Greer Garson (University Press of Kentucky, 1998; link).

“Margaretta Scott (Actress) Movies” last updated in May 2024.