Talk:Sally Gray

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Untitled[edit]

There is British TV presenter called Sally Gray as well, who was 37 in 2006.

Birth year[edit]

She was born in 1915 according to these sources:

I have corrected the article thus.

Crisso (talk) 03:17, 27 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Below is a full transcript of her ODNB entry, which is normally only available with a subscription:

Sally Gray, [née Constance Vera Stevens; married name Constance Vera Browne, Lady Oranmore and Browne] (1915-2006), actress, was born at 16 Loraine Road, Islington, London, on 14 February 1915, one of five children of Charles Stevens, motor cab driver, and his wife, Gertrude Grace, nee Green. Her mother, widowed early, encouraged Constance's stage aspirations by sending her to the children's section of the Fay Compton School of Dramatic Art. She made her acting debut aged ten in a production of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings, subsequently obtaining a scholarship to continue training at the school until she was sixteen.

A blonde beauty with elegant figure and delectably husky voice, she became a considerable dramatic actress in 1940s British cinema, after a dozen largely stereotyped roles in forgotten 1930s films. Her first appearance was an uncredited 'bit' in Maurice Elvey's adaptation of The School for Scandal (1930), along with other hopefuls Rex Harrison and Anna Neagle. After this unpropitious start she spent several years on the London stage in the chorus of the musicals Bow Bells (Hippodrome, 1932) and Jill Darling (Saville, 1934) and had a small acting part in Cole Porter's Shall We Dance? (1933), starring Fred Astaire, who befriended her and influenced her in dance techniques.

The prominent agent John Gliddon signed her after seeing her on stage. She first appeared in films as Sally Gray in small roles in five 1935 releases, moving slightly up the cast for the B-movie thriller Checkmate. Most of her 1930s films required of her little more than acceptable feminine decoration, which she provided effortlessly, but matters improved later in the decade. Whereas in the earlier films she simply went through paces learned from stage musicals, in 1939 she had a strong role as an alluring wife to the illusionist Paul Lukas in A Window in London, and held her own opposite George Sanders in The Saint in London. The latter, made for the American company RKO-Radio, led to the offer of a Hollywood contract, which she declined. She also appeared in several musicals, including The Lambeth Walk (1940), in which she sang the title song, and Over She Goes (1937) and Hold My Hand (1938), both co-starring Stanley Lupino (b. 1893), with whom she lived until his untimely death in 1942.

The turning point in Sally Gray's film career was Brian Desmond Hurst's popular wartime romantic melodrama Dangerous Moonlight (1941), in which she played a journalist who falls in love with a Polish pianist (Anton Walbrook). He is wounded and loses his memory in the battle of Britain but all ends well, with the lovers reconciled. Richard Adinsell's Warsaw Concerto was specially composed for the film. Dangerous Moonlight was rather lugubrious but Gray had warmth, sharpness, and sex appeal in her first undeniable star performance.

Gray was off-screen for five years after this, suffering a nervous breakdown, allegedly following Lupino's death. However, she scored a major stage success in the title role of the smart American comedy My Sister Eileen in 1943, offering a clever foil to the wisecracking Coral Browne as her sister. When she returned to the screen in the later 1940s there was a new maturity in her persona, sometimes touched with melancholy, sometimes with a sense of hard-won knowledge. She was affecting as the tragic ballerina Jenny Pearl in Carnival (1946), adapted from Compton Mackenzie's novel, though one writer thought it 'like winter weather: dull and wet' (Quinlan, 198). In Sidney Gilliat's invigorating comedy thriller Green for Danger (1946) she was top-billed as the nurse who provides Trevor Howard's romantic interest; and she gave a real centre to Desmond Hurst's The Mark of Cain (1947) as the site of contestation between two brothers (Patrick Holt and Eric Portman). Her other co-star in this, Dermot Walsh, recalled that she 'was one of the most beautiful women in the business and had a lovely voice. She was also a very nice person' (McFarlane, 590). She was, indeed, warmly remembered by her colleagues.

Gray's three most notable films followed in rapid succession, all having strong film noir affiliations. In Cavalcanti's They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), described by one critic as 'the key film' in post-war British noir (Spicer, 187), she was the spirited former girlfriend of a very nasty gangster, again finding romance with Trevor Howard as a disillusioned former serviceman; in Lance Comfort's inventive adaptation of Michael Pertwee's play, Silent Dust (1948), she brought a grave authority to the role of the woman seeking to disperse the oppressive ties of a supposedly dead war-hero husband; and in Obsession (1949) she played the faithless wife of Robert Newton, who exacts a bizarre revenge. In these she established herself as a major star in British films. In the event, however, she made only one more film, the insignificant Escape Route (1952), in which she and the fading American tough-guy George Raft smash a kidnapping racket.

On 1 December 1951 Gray married Dominick Geoffrey Edward Browne, fourth Baron Oranmore and Browne and second Baron Mereworth (1901-2002), and retired from the screen to live at his remote Castle MacGarratt in co. Mayo. They lived there, where she developed a taste for gardening, until financial problems caused them to resettle in a flat in Eaton Place, London, where they lived until their deaths. There were no children of the marriage, but he had eight children by his first two marriages (one of whom had died in infancy and a further three of whom predeceased him). She never wanted to talk about her career, writing in 1994, 'I do not give interviews by meetings or telephone' (personal knowledge). By all accounts a woman of charm and character, she put fame resolutely to one side and found other fulfilments in her long life. She died in London on 24 September 2006.

Brian McFarlane

Sources P. Noble, 'Sally Gray', Sound Wave Illustrated (Nov 1943) + D. Quinlan, British sound films: the studio years, 1928-1959 (1984) + 'Dermot Walsh', An autobiography of British cinema, ed. B. McFarlane (1997) + A. Spicer, Film noir (2002) + Daily Telegraph (29 Sept 2006) + The Independent (3 Oct 2006) + The Times (5 Oct 2006) + The Guardian (5 Oct 2006) + Burke, Peerage + BFI film and TV database, www.bfi.org.uk, accessed on 14 March 2008 + www.imdb.com, accessed on 14 March 2008 + personal knowledge (2010) + private information (2010) + b. cert. Archives FILM BFINA, performance footage Likenesses photographs, 1935-49, Getty Images, London, Hult. Arch. · photographs, 1946-56, Rex Features, London · obituary photographs · photograph, repro. in Leader Magazine (2 July 1949), cover · photograph, repro. in True Story (Jan 1947), cover · photograph, University of Bristol, Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection [see illus.] · portrait, repro. in Picturegoer, cover Wealth at death £148,345: probate, 4 May 2007, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Crisso (talk) 23:42, 27 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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