 Ten years and ten films into her screen career, the first 'official' Gainsborough melodrama, The Man in Grey (d. Leslie Arliss, 1943) made Phyllis Calvert (1915-2002) a bona fide star and one of the studio's biggest attractions.
The following year she headlined three more Gainsborough films - Fanny by Gaslight (d. Anthony Asquith), Madonna of the Seven Moons (d. Arthur Crabtree) and Two Thousand Women (d. Frank Launder) and would subsequently appear in They Were Sisters (d. Arthur Crabtree, 1945), The Magic Bow (d. Bernard Knowles, 1946), The Root of All Evil (d. Brock Williams, 1947) and Broken Journey (d. Ken Annakin, 1948).
Most of the time she drew what looked like the short straw, playing the "good girl" in films that revelled in the exploits of her wicked opposite number, and it says much for her talent and charisma that she was able to hold attention in what must have seemed thankless parts - she herself acknowledged that "I do think it is much more difficult to establish a really charming, nice person than a wicked one - and make it real".
Patricia Roc played a similar role in The Wicked Lady (d. Leslie Arliss, 1945) and undoubtedly suffered from the comparison with Margaret Lockwood, but Calvert held her own in The Man in Grey and Fanny by Gaslight and went on to give an impressively nuanced performance as the amnesiac heroine of Madonna of the Seven Moons.
Although Calvert was never especially fond of the Gainsborough films, there is little doubt that they were the high point of her cinema career. A 1947 attempt to break into Hollywood failed, and her subsequent British films (with the notable exception of Mandy (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1952)), generally made little impression. Her post-1950s career was mostly spent in theatre and television.
Michael Brooke
| 
FILM & TV CREDITS
