Muriel Pavlow
Actress with a wholesome image who was best known for Reach for the Sky and Doctor in the House
MURIEL PAVLOW, who has died aged 97, was an actress of British stage and screen whose speciality was wholesomeness. She was customarily cast as the hero’s supportive wife or girlfriend, rarely as a minx – a role which did not suit her. She is best remembered as Douglas Bader’s loyal wife in Reach for the Sky (1956), and as the student nurse for whom Dirk Bogarde falls in Doctor in the House (1954).
Her youthful good looks sometimes proved a disadvantage. Casting directors tended to pigeon-hole her in ingénue roles, denying her more meaty ones. More than a starlet but less than a star, she never found parts to tap her potential, but she was always dependable. In a small way, British cinema would have been poorer without her.
As a young actress her looks were an especial handicap. Her first stage appearance was in Glasgow in 1936 as one of the children in The Old Maid. She was 15, playing a nine-year-old. Questions were raised in the local press about the propriety of keeping a toddler up so late. In 1941, aged 20, she was still being cast in juvenile roles.
As she matured, she was seen in film circles as an “innocent young thing” fresh out of convent school. In reality, she was no prude. “Who knows what one would be prepared to do if one were 20 years younger?” she later speculated. “If I were young now, I would probably say it is part of today’s thing and if I’ve got to strip off, here goes.”
Muriel Lilian Pavlow was born at Lewisham, south London, on June 27 1921, the daughter of Boris Pavlow, a salesman, and Germaine, née Georget. He was a Russian émigré, while she was French, although both families had settled in Lausanne. There was something a touch “foreign” about Muriel’s features, though only one director spotted this – Brian Desmond Hurst in Malta Story (1953), in which he cast her as a Maltese girl who falls in love with Alec Guinness’s RAF pilot during the war.
The film was fairly pedestrian, a typical British picture of the time, failing to do full justice to the island that won a collective George Cross for gallantry in the struggle against Hitler. Muriel Pavlow’s role, however, pointed to ways in which her screen personality might have developed. It hinted, delicately, at very un-english passions beneath the superficial sangfroid. Alas, none of her later roles followed up this lead.
She was educated at Colne Valley school in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, and in Lausanne, where she is said to have acquired a facility in languages never seriously tested in her career. She was, however, a dab hand at accents, which went down well in Australia, which she toured with her husband in Mary, Mary in 1964-65. Her early stage appearance in The
Old Maid in Glasgow in 1936 led to a London debut later in the year at the Covent Garden Theatre in a revival of
Oedipus Rex, in which she was one of the king’s daughters. Her first film, in 1937, was A Romance in Flanders, in which she played a bit part. More interesting was A Quiet Wedding (1941), in which she was cast against type as the obnoxious bride.
It was far from her best work, but it marked the first time that she acted opposite her future husband, Derek Farr. They married in 1947, after co-starring the previous year in The
Shop at Sly Corner. She attracted more favourable notice in Night Boat to
Dublin (1946), an espionage thriller depicting British and Nazi efforts to snare a Swedish scientist working on the atom bomb.
After marrying Farr, she retired from the screen for five years to be a housewife, though she continued intermittently to appear in the West End. Her comeback picture was It
Started in Paradise (1952), a high-flown melodrama about the world of haute couture. Though a work of no great consequence, it heralded the most productive decade of her career. This included not only Doctor in the
House – “It was my first experience of being in a smash-hit movie, and it was a very sweet experience,” she said – and its 1957 sequel, Doctor at Large (in which Farr also appeared), but also The
Net (1953), a spy thriller about test pilots, Reach for the Sky, the light comedy Simon and Laura (1955) and Conflict of Wings (1954).
Conflict of Wings was made by Group 3, the government-backed unit intended to challenge the domination by Rank and ABC of the British film industry. A worthy project, it focused on opposition to plans to convert a Norfolk bird sanctuary into a missile testing range. Contemporary opinion was polite rather than enthusiastic: the shots of sky and water were described as delightful, “with always some photogenic article in view – a Vampire jet, a sailing dinghy or Muriel Pavlow”.
Other films in which she appeared in the 1950s included Rooney (1958), an Irish variant on the Cinderella theme. She played the niece of a boarding house landlady, kept as a drudge but turned into a princess through the love of a lodger (John Gregson) who happens to be a dustman.
In Whirlpool (1959), she had a small part as second lead to Juliette Greco, while in the thriller Tiger in the Smoke
(1956) she was menaced by an excommando combing London for missing loot. She also featured in
Murder, She Said (1961), the first of the films in which Margaret Rutherford played Miss Marple.
After this, film work dried up, but Muriel Pavlow continued to pursue her theatrical career, which she had never abandoned. In the 1954-55 season, for example, she had been a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-avon, where she played the two Biancas in
Othello and The Taming of the Shrew,
Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cressida in Troilus and Cressida.
This last part, however, exceeded her range and her performance was conceded to be too sympathetic.
She co-starred on stage with Derek Farr in Odd Man In in 1957 and a Kenneth Horne comedy, Wolf ’s
Clothing, in 1959. She made two trips to Australia, first in 1959-60, touring in
Odd Man In, and secondly in 1964-65, again with Farr. At Broken Hill, the rough, tough mining town in New South Wales, she performed in a barn to the accompaniment of rain pouring through the bullet holes in the roof. Her other plays included Critics’ Choice at the Vaudeville and Murder in
the Vicarage at the Fortune Theatre in 1979, in which she played Miss Marple. She starred in Terence Rattigan’s In
Praise of Love in South Africa and reprised her performance at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in 1974-75. Latterly, she appeared on television in character roles, notably Queen Victoria in The Ravelled Thread (1978), as well as small parts in series such as
The Bill, House of Cards, Men Behaving Badly and Black Books.
Muriel Pavlow was married to Derek Farr from 1947 until he died in 1986. There were no children.
Muriel Pavlow, born June 27 1921, died January 19 2019