Margaret Rutherford – A Truly Dramatic Life

Victoria’s post on Sir Alec Guiness prompted me to recall how much I’d always enjoyed the great character actress Margaret Rutherford and to do a bit of research. What I discovered was downright hair raising. Margaret was the only child of William Rutherford Benn and his wife, the former Florence Nicholson.

Wikipedia tells us that Rutherford’s father suffered from mental illness and had a nervous breakdown on his honeymoon, afterward being confined to an asylum. He was eventually released on holiday and on 4 March 1883 he murdered his father, Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamberpot. Shortly afterward, William tried to kill himself as well, by slashing his throat with a pocketknife. William Benn was confined to the Broadmoor Aslyum for the Criminally Insane and was released several years later, reportedly cured. He changed his surname to Rutherford (no wonder!) and returned to his wife. The parents then moved to India with the infant Margaret, but the drama continued unabated – her mother committed suicide by hanging herself from a tree, three year old Margaret was sent back to Britain to live with an aunt, professional governess Bessie Nicholson, in Wimbledon and her father’s continued mental illness resulted in his being confined once more to Broadmoor in 1904; he died in 1921.

The intervening years must have been relatively peaceful, as Margaret eventually managed to secure a place at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, although she didn’t make her stage debut at the Old Vic until 1925 at the age of thirty-three.

She married the openly homosexual actor Stringer Davis in 1945 and they appeared in many productions together (right). They were happily together until Rutherford’s death in 1972. Davis absolutely adored Margaret, one friend noting: ‘For him she was not only a great talent but, above all, a beauty.’ Dubbed by bitchy colleagues as ‘String-along’, he rarely left her side. He was private secretary and general dogsbody, lugging bags, teapots, hot water bottles, teddy bears and nursing Margaret through her ‘bad spells’. These manic depressive episodes – often involving mental hospitals and electrotherapy – were hushed up.

As if their lives didn’t contain enough drama, in the 1950s, Rutherford and Davis adopted the writer Gordon Langley Hall, then in his twenties. Hall later had gender reassignment surgery and became Dawn Langley Simmons, under which name she wrote a biography of Rutherford in 1983. Hall was born at Sissinghurst, the estate of the writer Vita Sackville-West, in Heathfield, Sussex, England, and was the illegitimate child of Jack Copper, Sackville-West’s chauffeur (a grandfather was Rudyard Kipling’s gardener) and Marjorie Hall Ticehurst, who came, Hall always said, from a high social class. Hall said she was born with an adrenal abnormality that causes the female genitalia to resemble a man’s and was thus raised as a boy. She always maintained that she was — unequivocally — female. In 1950 she emigrated to the U.S. and in 1968, she underwent the sex change operation and the next year married her 22-year-old black butler, John-Paul Simmons. The publisher of ”Dawn: A Charleston Legend” was quoted as calling it the first documented interracial marriage in Charleston’s history. A bomb threat forced the couple to move the wedding from a Baptist church to the bride’s home, and the gifts were destroyed by a firebomb.

In England, Miss Rutherford was reported to have said, ”I am delighted that Gordon has become a woman, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of another race, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of a lower station, but I understand the man is a Baptist!”

Ironically, Dawn did a bit of acting herself – she became an extra in the ABC/Warner Bros miniseries North and South while visiting Charleston in 1985.

Margaret Rutherford and her daughter, Dawn

But back to Margaret herself – Rutherford made her first appearance in London’s West End theatres in 1933 but her talent was not recognised by the critics until her performance as Miss Prism in the play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ (1939). In summer 1941, Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” opened on the London stage, with Coward himself directing. Rutherford played Madame Arcati, the fake psychic in a role in which Coward had earlier envisaged for her and which he then especially shaped. It would be Rutherford’s turn as Madame Arcati in David Lean’s ‘Blithe Spirit’ (1945) that would actually establish her screen success. This would become one of her most memorable performances, with her bicycling about the Kentish countryside, cape fluttering behind her. Interestingly it would also establish the model for portraying that pseudo-soothsayer forever thereafter and there have been about six remakes of the film.

Some of Margaret’s finest screen work was done when she was in her fifties. She was superb as Nurse Carey in Miranda (1948) and completely believable in the role of Professor Hatton Jones in Passport to Pimlico (1949). More success followed as she starred along Alistir Sim in ‘The Happiest Days of Your Life’ (1950). Then came along the role that she was so destined for, that of Miss Letitia Prism in Anthony Asquiths ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ (1952). Incredibly, despite a whole string of very capable and distinguished performances – she had still not won a single film honour. More comic characters followed including Prudence Croquet in ‘An Alligator Named Daisy’ (1955).

Rutherford then played Mrs. Fazackalee in Basil Deardens ‘The Smallest Show on Earth’ (1957) with such notables as Virginia McKenna, Peter Sellers and Leslie Phillips. For much of the 60’s she become synonymous with Miss Jane Marple, making four Marple based films with a comedy bent that must have won Christie’s approval, as in 1962 Agatha Christie dedicated her novel The Mirror Crack’d: “To Margaret Rutherford in admiration.” Margaret was awarded an OBE for services to stage and screen in 1961 and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe for The VIPs (1963), as the absent-minded Duchess of Brighton, opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. She also played Mistress Quickly in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight in 1966 and was raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1967.

Margaret suffered from Alzheimer’s disease at the end of her life. Sir John Gielgud wrote: “Her last appearance at the Haymarket Theatre with Sir Ralph Richardson in The Rivals, an engagement which she was finally obliged to give up after a few weeks, was a most poignant struggle against her obviously failing powers.” She died in 1972. Britain’s top actors flocked to the funeral, where 90-year old Dame Sybil Thorndike praised her friend’s enormous talent and recalled that she “never said anything horrid about anyone.”

You can watch a video tribute to Margaret Rutherford here.

Sezincote: Inspiration for Brighton Pavilion

Victoria here. Almost all of us who have read about the English Regency period know what Brighton Pavilion looks like (right). The wildly over-the-top architecture was the result of a notion of the Prince Regent’s, after he saw the Cotswold estate known as Sezincote.

Sezincote (left) surprises the English countryside in Gloucestershire near Moreton-in-Marsh. A house that might look customary on the Indian sub-continent instead is fit into beautiful gardens and surrounded by the Cotswold Hills.

The name Sezincote is a modern version of Cheisnecote, meaning home of the oaks, a combination of French and Old English names. The property is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086; it was an independent estate and parish until the Civil War when the church was destroyed by Parliamentary troops.

In 1795, Colonel John Cockerell bought the estate from the 3rd Earl of Guildford. Cockerell was a wealthy nabob, recently returned from makihg a fortune in India. He may have purchased the property to be near his good friend Warren Hastings, who had been governor of Bengal. Hastings had numerous connections with the Austen and Hancock families.

Upon Colonel Cockerell’s death in 1798, his youngest brother Charles inherited Sezincote. Charles was created a baronet in 1809 and was a Member of Parliament from Evesham. He asked his brother, Samuel Pepys Cockerell, an architect of no small reputation, to build him a new house in the Indian style. From the architect’s name, you might guess that the family was related to Samuel Pepys – and you would be right, though it was distant.

S. P. Cockerell had been a surveyor to the East India Company and was a colleague of Regency architect John Nash. (1754-1835) as apprentice to Sir Robert Taylor. S. P. Cockerell collaborated with artist Thomas Daniell, another recent returnee from India, to draw up the plans. The exterior is a combination of Hindu and Moslem influences (mostly Persian in origin), while the interior is purely neoclassical.

The architecture is based on Indian styles in the period of Akbar, Moghul Emperor from 1556-1605, who had attempted to integrate the two great religions of India through merging their characteristic design elements. You can see in today’s conflicts between India and Pakistan that Akbar had no more success than his successors on the subcontinent.

The main rooms face south on the garden, and the Orangery curves gracefully outward to the Pavilion, once the home of exotic birds. The house was completed in first decade of the 19th century, after which the Prince Regent visited. Here he got his ideas about further alterations to his Brighton house, the Marine Pavilion. The baronetcy given to Charles Cockerell years leads one to assume Cockerell and Prinny saw more of each other.

The Cockerell family owned Sezincote until 1884 when it was sold, then sold again in 1944 to Sir Cyril Kleinwort whose daughter and husband now live in the house.

Cockerell’s plans included many Eastern ideas in the garden, including the Temple to Surya, a Hindu sun god, overlooking the pool. The current residents have restored and extended these gardens, on which Humphrey Repton was once consulted (remember references to Repton in Mansfield Park). Mrs. Peake, daughter of the Kleinworts, was out in the garden in her Wellies, digging away, when I toured the estate. She is a gracious lady and loves to welcome visitors to her incredible home. You can see more about Sezincote here.  I think Sezincote is lovely and I can understand why the Prince Regent wanted to have his own version.
However, this is how his Marine Pavilion looked in 1815, right, before Prinny got John Nash working on it.  I think it is beautiful, quite nicer than the eventual hodge-podge of the finished structure.

Someone said of Prinny’s folly, “It looks like St. Paul’s Cathedral moved to Brighton and whelped.” I have spent time in the Pavilion, but give me Sezincote any day! Well, if only someone would…

Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman

Mrs Grace Dalrymple

Cincinnati Art Museum: September 18, 2010 – January 2, 2011
San Diego Museum of Art: January 29, 2011 – May 1, 2011

Exhibition includes a selection of Gainsborough’s most iconic portraits of renowned society women of eighteenth-century Britain.

The portraits of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) made him perhaps the most famous British artist of the late eighteenth century. Nobles, statesmen, musicians and the range of men and women of the period’s merchant class all sat for him. But it is his portraits of notorious society women—widely considered among the greatest of the Western tradition—which attracted the most attention.

Eighteenth-century viewers appreciated these paintings differently than we do today. In his own time, Gainsborough’s portraits of actresses, performers and courtesans were seen as unconventional, if not radical, not only because of the type of woman they portrayed but also because of the unconventional way they were painted.

Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

“These stunning portraits not only give us a perspective on the history of celebrity, but also on the history of women and of painting. These are provocative women provocatively painted,” explains exhibition curator Benedict Leca.

Organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum in association with the San Diego Museum of Art, Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman is the first exhibition devoted to Thomas Gainsborough’s feminine portraiture, and the first to focus specifically on modernity and femininity in Georgian England from the perspective of Gainsborough’s groundbreaking portraits of women.

Giovanna Baccelli
Ann Ford, Mrs. Phillip Thicknesse

Coinciding with the comprehensive cleaning and restoration of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s iconic Ann Ford (Mrs. Thicknesse), this exhibition unites a choice selection of thirteen paintings from renowned museum collections in the United States and Britain to illuminate the role that Gainsborough’s extraordinary portraiture played in defining new, progressive feminine identities.

 Among others on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum, September 18, 2010 – January 2, 2011 will be Mrs. Siddons (National Gallery, London), Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan (National Gallery, Washington), Giovanna Baccelli (Tate Britain), Grace Dalrymple (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Viscountess Ligonier (Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens).

Penelope, Viscountess Ligonier

Anne, Countess of Chesterfield

The exhibition will also feature a small selection of period dresses from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s rich fashion arts and textile collection, thereby further contextualizing Gainsborough’s portraits while affording visitors a view of the material accessories of the “modern woman.”

If Gainsborough’s portraits help us to rethink the place of women in the eighteenth century, they also ask us to look anew at the formal specifics that made his portraits so important to ambitious women and their self-definition in the celebrity culture of the period. In his use of provocative postures and slashing brushwork, Gainsborough’s portraits of notorious women differed from those of his peers: they were the way he asserted his own place as the premier painter of modern life.

Mrs. Siddons

 In the eighteenth century, portraits were part of an active negotiation of social and gender relations, and the exhibition’s thesis is that a special complicity between artist and sitter formed the basis from which both conspired to upend traditional portraiture and calcified gender roles.

The exhibition was conceived by Benedict Leca, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s curator of European paintings, sculpture and drawings. Additional curatorial support for the exhibition’s presentation in San Diego has been provided by John Marciari, curator of European art, and Scot Jaffe, associate director for exhibitions and collections.

After premiering in Cincinnati this fall (September 18, 2010 – January 2, 2011) the exhibition will travel to the San Diego Museum of Art, where it will be on view from January 29, 2011 – May 1, 2011. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated, full-color catalog published by D Giles Limited, London, featuring essays by Benedict Leca, renowned costume historian Aileen Ribeiro, and art historian Amber Ludwig of Boston University. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.

Hatfield, a Prodigy House in Hertfordshire

Victoria here, peeking into another great country house, this one the home of the Cecil family, the Marquesses of Salisbury, Hatfield House. 

When I took the course on English Country Houses at Worcester College, Oxford University, our don, Geoffrey Tyack, took us to a number of historically significant houses, beginning with medieval manors and carrying into the Tudor houses, the most lavish of which are known as Prodigy Houses. These were the estates acquired by the “new” men who served the crown because of their intelligence,  education, and ability rather than by familial ties and nepotism. Once these “new” men got into positions of power, however, they did all they could to advance the interests of their families, particularly at court. One part of this quest was to have a large, profitable and magnificent estate at which to entertain, impress, and achieve strategic partnerships, whether by friendship, marriage or intrigue.  These houses, naturally, had to be large and luxurious enough to accommodate both royalty and its entourage.

One of the most important of the men who served Elizabeth I was William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598), who was Lord High Treasurer. He built Burghley House (above) between 1555 and 1587 in a more-than-grand scale. His eldest son, 1st Earl of Exeter, carried on the family at Burghley.
Robert Cecil (1563-1612), a younger son of Lord Burghley, made his own way in the world and did a bang-up job of it, becoming a chief minister to Elizabeth I and Lord Treasurer to her successor, James I. As Professor Tyack has written, Robert Cecil “also inherited his father’s taste for magnificent building.”

Robert Cecil was made the 1st Earl of Salisbury and took over, by exchange with the King for another house called Theobalds, the estate at Hatfield. The Old Palace there, above and right, had been the childhood home of Elizabeth I. The building you see in the pictures was only part of the huge complex, most of which the Earl demolished. The Old Palace now serves as a tourist attraction and a venue for meetings, conferences, banquets and weddings.

Lord Salisbury created for himself the foremost example of Jacobean architecture in Britain. Carpenter and Surveyor (the profession of architect was barely in its infancy) Robert Lyminge laid out the house to the earl’s preferences, incorporating familiar Tudor features (e.g. the capped cupolas at the corners and the oriel windows), and newer styles such as the classical loggia on the south front.

Entering the Marble Hall, I could see that the 1st Earl had indeed achieved his goal of creating a gathering place of incomparable and extravagant richness. It could not fail to impress friends or enemies, retainers or royalty. The ceiling is original though enhanced in the Victorian era with more colorful paintings. Tapestries from Brussels cover the walls, illustrating stories from mythology. This room has always been used for entertaining whether banquets, balls or masques.

Left is the rainbow portrait of Elizabeth I, which contains the motto Non sine sole iris, translated as “no rainbow without the sun.” The anonymous painter was heavily into flattery, one imagines. The portrait hangs in the Marble Hall, where no visitor could mistake its significance.


The Grand Staircase is a fine example of Jacobean wood-carving expertise. Finished in 1611, it includes gates at the bottom step to keep the dogs from lounging around in the state rooms upstairs. One of the figures carved into a newel post is John Tradescant (c.1570-1638), the great plant collector on behalf of Robert Cecil and his new garden. Tradescant brought back from his world travels many fruit trees, vines, seeds and bulbs, greatly expanding the scope of English gardening, all of which enhanced his employer’s prestige.

On the first floor (what we in the U.S. would call the second floor), the magnificent State rooms are divided into two apartments, one each for the king and queen. In King James’s Drawing Room a life size statue of the king stands above the fireplace. The walls are hung with old master paintings.
Long galleries were required in all Jacobean houses but few are as splendid as this one, with its fine cabinetry holding treasured gemstones and its gilded ceiling. Two gigantic fireplaces heated the gallery, where one could enjoy a morning stroll without combating the elements.

Many more rooms are open to the public, including a chapel with fine old stained glass, some of it more than 400 years old.

The house is much the same today as it was when first built, though one wing was destroyed by fire in 1835, taking the life of the first Marchioness of Salisbury, nee Emily Mary Hill, then age 85. The dowager, as she was known, was writing by candlelight, it was said, and her hair caught fire, eventually engulfing the entire west wing of the house.  Emily (1750-1835), wife of the first Marquess, portrayed here by Sir Joshua Reynolds about 1780, was a famed Tory political hostess and sportswoman.

Her son, James, the 2nd Marquess, married Frances Mary (1802-1839), known as the Gascoyne Heiress, and changed the family name to Gascoyne-Cecil. The story of Frances, often known as Fanny, is told in the book The Gascoyne Heiress: the Life and Diaries of Frances Mary Gascoyne-Cecil by Carola Oman, published in1968 by Hodder & Stoughton in London. These diaries are full of exciting political news, for Fanny became a close confidante of the Duke of Wellington, who had long been a family friend. Hatfield House is home to much Wellington memorabilia; both with her husband and children or solo, Fanny often visited Wellington, listened to his every word and recorded most of them for posterity.
This black and white reproduction of Fanny’s portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence does not do justice to her charm.

Like many country houses, Hatfield is also a business enterprise. Many events takes place here and no doubt you have caught a glimpse of the house or garden in one of the doszens of movies which shot scenes on the premises, such as Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), or The Golden Age (2006).

The current dowager marchioness is well-known as a gardener, though she claims to be entirely an amateur. Not only did she redo entirely the gardens at Hatfield, she also has designed gardens for many others, including the Prince of Wales at Highgrove.  She has been associated with a number of books on gardening, though she no longer lives at Hatfield.

I took so many pictures in the Hatfield Garden that I could almost do a book myself. But have you ever come home and realized that your pictures completely failed to capture the essence of the subject matter? Below is a shot of a rose against the brick of the Old Palace followed by some lovely wisteria blossoms. Somehow it was all so much more beautiful on site!

                              Finally, an aerial view of Hatfield House.

Happy Birthday, George IV

On 12 August 1762, England rejoiced in the birth of a son to King George III and his Queen.  Later known as George IV, he was the King of Hanover and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death on 26 June, 1830.

Volumes have been written on the life of George, The Prince of Wales, known as Prinny.

Above, how the caricaturist George Cruikshank (1792-1878) celebrated the Prince Regent’s 50th Birthday in 1812; The Prince dances while outside the people suffer.
George Augustus Frederick was the eldest child of George III and Sophie Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, usually referred to as Queen Charlotte.
In this family portrait by Johann Zoffany (1733-1810) from about 1765, Prince George is on the right, his brother Frederick (Duke of York, 1763-1827) on the other side of their mother. They were the first of 15 children.

By 1770 when Johann Zoffany painted the family again, George (in red) and Frederick (in gold) had been joined by four more siblings: left, William (with parrot), Edward (center with dog), Charlotte and baby Augusta.
According to his biographers, young George was a good student, fluent in several languages and “very promising.” However, in the tradition of the Hanoverian kings, his father was disappointed in him, worried about his lack of obedience to the scriptures and his loose ways with the truth.

The miniature of George, right, was painted by the famed Richard Cosway about 1780 when George was nearing his majority.

John Hoppner (1758 – 1810) painted the Prince of Wales in 1792. The portrait hangs in the Wallace Collection in London.

 The portrait below also hangs in the Wallace Collection.

By the time he turned 21 in 1783, the Prince had already experienced several passionate love affairs, most notoriously with the beautiful actress Mary Robinson* who performed at the Drury Lane Theatre as Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The Prince was smitten and wrote to her, signing his name as Florizel, and the affair was soon known to the general public. The King was very angry and their relationship never improved vastly.  But we shall leave the story of the Prince of Wales —  “First Gentleman of Europe,” collector of houses, furniture, paintings et. al., bigamist and serial adulterer, gambler and spendthrift, and father least likely to succeed — until a later blog.

For now we offer our felicitations on the 248th birthday of George IV, Prince, Regent and King.
* Mary Robinson’s life (1757-1800) was short and sad.  She retired from the stage after various afflictions and became a well-known poetess and novelist. For more details on the life of Mary Robinson, we recommend Hester Davenport’s biography published in 2006: The Prince’s Mistress Perdita: A Life of Mary Robinson.