Occupation Actress Children Sarah Jane Whyte Parents Arnold Pilbeam | Role Film actress Name Nova Pilbeam | |
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Full Name Nova Margery Pilbeam Died July 17, 2015, London, United Kingdom Movies Young and Innocent, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tudor Rose, Counterblast, The Next of Kin Similar People Pen Tennyson, Berthold Viertel, Herbert Wilcox, Walter Forde, Robert Stevenson | ||
Nova Margery Pilbeam (15 November 1919 – 17 July 2015) was a British film and stage actress. She played leading roles in two Alfred Hitchcock movies of the 1930s. She made her last film in 1948.
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Early life and career
Pilbeam was born in Wimbledon, London. Her parents were Arnold Pilbeam, an actor and theatre manager, and Margery Stopher Pilbeam.
Time magazine reported that the actress, whose first name was a homage to her maternal grandmother from Nova Scotia, opted to keep her birth name, which she considered far less ridiculous than "Myrna Loy" or "Greta Garbo".
Pilbeam gained attention as a child stage actress. This led to much work in her teen years, appearing in Alfred Hitchcock's film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), in which she is abducted by Peter Lorre's character, followed by her lead performance as Lady Jane Grey in Tudor Rose (1935). Pilbeam had a starring role in Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937), which she regarded as "the sunniest film I was involved with", forming a constructive professional relationship with Hitchcock.
In 1939 she appeared on an early British television drama. That year, David O. Selznick wanted Pilbeam for the lead in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and thought she could be an international film star. However, her agent was worried about the length of a five-year contract and meanwhile Hitchcock, whose outlook on the film was not the same as Selznick's, auditioned hundreds of others over many months, at last giving the role to Joan Fontaine. Unlike some of her peers, Pilbeam never made a film in Hollywood. She carried on with appearances in at least nine British films along with many stage roles throughout the 1940s. One of Pilbeam's last films was The Three Weird Sisters (1948), its post-war Gothic-drama screenplay credited to five writers, among them Dylan Thomas. She continued working on stage for a short while longer, appearing at the Duchess Theatre in Toni Block's play Flowers for the Living in February 1950.
Personal life
In 1939 Pilbeam married Pen Tennyson, a great-grandson of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and an assistant director to Hitchcock. Tennyson became a film director the year they were married but died in a 1941 plane crash while working as part of the Admiralty's instructional films unit. Pilbeam was married to BBC Radio journalist Alexander Whyte from 1950 until his death in 1972. Their child Sarah Jane was born in 1952.
In her last years, Pilbeam lived in Dartmouth Park, North London. She died on 17 July 2015 in London, aged 95.
