Nova Pilbeam

Actress Born: November 15, 1919; Died: July 17, 2015. NOVA PILBEAM, who has died at the age of 95, was best known as a young screen star in the 1930s who appeared in two of Alfred Hitchcock’s British talkies – and who almost went to Hollywood with him.

Bright-eyed and vivacious, Pilbeam was 13 when she made her name as a critically acclaimed child star in two 1934 films – Little Friend, a drama about the effects of divorce on a young girl, and Hitchcock’s original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (he later remade it with James Stewart and Doris Day).

In the latter film, the one that put Hitchcock on the international map and was also the first English language film to feature the great German character actor Peter Lorre, Pilbeam played Betty Lawrence, the child who is abducted while on holiday in Switzerland, in order to prevent her parents revealing accidentally received information about a political assassination due to take place in London. Pilbeam not only impressed audiences; she impressed her director too. Alfred Hitchcock later commented: “Even at that time, she had the intelligence of a fully grown woman. She had plenty of confidence and ideas of her own.”

Three years later, when he was making Young And Innocent, Hitchcock cast Pilbeam in a leading role as a chief constable’s daughter who helps a wrongly accused murder suspect escape from the police and go on the run – an early example of the familiar Hitchcock theme about innocent bystanders finding themselves being chased by both cops and criminals. Still only 17, Pilbeam gave an impressive performance as the feisty heroine who becomes more vulnerable as she falls for the man she helps.

Hitchcock and Pilbeam got on very well, and the young actress was considered for the lead role in his next film, The Lady Vanishes (1938) but it went to the young Margaret Lockwood instead. Despite being favoured by the producer David O Selznick, another chance of major stardom eluded Pilbeam when Hitchcock chose American actress Joan Fontaine over her for the part of the wide-eyed romantic who becomes the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca (1940), his first Hollywood film. Who knows how differently both her and Hitchcock’s Hollywood career might have turned out had she landed that role and a five-year contract with starmaker Selznick?

Nova Margery Pilbeam was born in Wimbledon in 1919, and named after her maternal grandmother who came from Nova Scotia. Her father, Arnold Pilbeam, was stage manager at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith and Nova made her stage debut at the age of five in an amateur children’s fantasy. Seven years later, she made her professional debut in Toad Of Toad Hall at the Savoy Theatre in London and did not stop from that point on.

Pilbeam’s sensitive performance in Little Friend earned her a seven-year contract with Gaumont-British and an introduction to Hitchcock. In the theatre, which was her preferred medium, she was given JM Barrie’s personal approval to play Peter Pan at the London Palladium in 1935 and over the next few years, the blonde teenager juggled film and stage roles, among them Lady Jane Grey in the star-studded movie Tudor Rose (1936) and as Rosalind in As You Like It, in 1936, with the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

After Young And Innocent and a two-year absence from the big screen, Pilbeam returned with Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), now regarded as a forerunner to the great post-war Ealing comedies, followed by Pastor Hall (1940), the first of a number of war movies she made. By this time, she was married to Penrose (“Pen”) Tennyson, the great-grandson of the poet, and Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant director, whom she had met on the set of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

In July 1941, Tennyson, who was making films for the Navy, was killed in a plane crash in Scotland. Pilbeam threw herself into work, concentrating more on plays than films, in which she was seen only in minor roles from this time on. In the early 1940s, she joined the Old Vic Company, on wartime exile from London in Liverpool, and further into the war did a stint with the Dundee Rep. In 1946, she played Tracy Lord – the part made famous on screen by Katharine Hepburn – in The Philadelphia Story at Windsor, where her father was by this time the theatre’s business manager.

Pilbeam’s final West End appearance, in early 1950, was in Toni Block’s Flowers For The Living, alongside Kathleen Harrison. Later that year, she married Alexander Hamilton Whyte, a BBC radio journalist. Following the birth of their daughter, Sarah Jane, in 1952, Pilbeam abandoned her acting career entirely and withdrew into a very private life, eschewing requests for interviews even decades after her retirement.

She was widowed in 1972, and is survived by her daughter.