Ethel Griffies

Ethel Griffies belonged to the English-speaking theatre first, working stages in Britain and in the United States, and she came to the screen as the kind of performer studios needed constantly and credited rarely. The earliest film work gathered here bears that out: her parts in Alice in Wonderland and Bombshell went out uncredited, as did the landladies, matrons and titled women she supplied to Waterloo Bridge, The Painted Veil and Son of Fury. By the count in her biography she turned up in something like a hundred pictures.

What she was hired for was a very particular thing, the elderly Englishwoman who is not impressed. As Grace Poole in the 1943 Jane Eyre she minds the locked upstairs of Thornfield and volunteers nothing. As Mrs. Whack in Werewolf of London she is comic relief dropped into a horror picture and plays it perfectly straight. Mrs. Nicholas in How Green Was My Valley, Mrs. Kane in Stranger on the Third Floor, Mrs. Nelson in The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry: the same flat, unhurried delivery, tilting a scene without raising her voice.

The late run is the remarkable part. In 1963 alone she appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, as the ornithologist Mrs. Bundy, and in Billy Liar as Grandma Florence, two films from different countries and different decades of filmmaking, thirty years after her first credits here. She was well into her eighties and still took a television part after that. At 97, when she died, she was described as one of the oldest working actors in the English-speaking theatre.