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Mrs John Bull: The Later Life Stardom of Margaret Rutherford

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Lasting Screen Stars

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Abstract

Mortimer’s chapter analyses the later life stardom of Margaret Rutherford, examining her film career trajectory from middle-aged character actor to international stardom. The chapter explores the importance of age, gender and social class in constructing a persona which flourished in post-war British film comedy. Mortimer locates Rutherford’s star image within the tradition of the unruly woman and the carnivalesque nature of film comedy. Rutherford’s persona as an ageing woman is representative of a bygone era, a social class that seemed endangered and irrelevant, and a sense of Britishness that was equally on the cusp of irrelevance, within a film industry which entered into drastic decline. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Rutherford’s performance of age in her role as Miss Marple for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mikhail Bakhtin identifies the grotesque body as being at the heart of the carnival spirit of Renaissance popular culture. He illustrates the grotesque with the terracotta figures of ‘senile pregnant hags’, who are laughing (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 25). They are grotesque in defying categorisation, in being both birth and death, ‘on the threshold of the grave and crib’ (p. 26). The spirit of the grotesque belonged to the world of popular festivities of the Middle Ages, and inform comic tradition.

  2. 2.

    Interview with Wendy Jones, 8 April 1964, Today in the South and West, BBC; BBC Written Archives, Caversham.

  3. 3.

    Alexander Walker reviewing Rutherford’s performance in Murder, She Said, cited in Dreadnought with Good Manners (Merriman, 2009, p. 225).

  4. 4.

    Cited in Dreadnought with Good Manners (Merriman, 2009, p. 219).

  5. 5.

    Writing in 1956, Eric Keown decried the extent to which she was typecast by ‘film moguls’ as ‘an eccentric parish-worker’ (Keown, 1956, p. 31).

  6. 6.

    Melvin Maddocks in The Christian Science Monitor, cited in Rutherford’s autobiography (Rutherford, 1972, p. 178).

  7. 7.

    For example, Timothy Spall’s performance as Rutherford in the television play For One Night Only (Bilbow, 1993), Andy Merriman’s Dreadnought with Good Manners (Merriman, 2009), being the basis for the BBC radio play A Monstrous Vitality (Merriman, 2011), and more recently, Philip Meeks’s play Murder Margaret and Me (2013), which dramatizes the friendship between Rutherford and Agatha Christie.

  8. 8.

    Rutherford would reject roles if she didn’t feel there was enough to them. She initially turned down the role of the duchess in The VIPs as she felt that ‘the character […] had no beginning, middle or end. There was simply nothing there for me to get my teeth into’ (Rutherford, 1972, p. 192).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Art, Media and American Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Claire Mortimer

Authors
  1. Claire Mortimer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Languages, Linguistics and Fil, Queen Mary University of London, LONDON, United Kingdom

    Lucy Bolton

  2. Queen Mary University of London, School of Languages, Linguistics & Film, United Kingdom

    Julie Lobalzo Wright

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© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)

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Mortimer, C. (2016). Mrs John Bull: The Later Life Stardom of Margaret Rutherford. In: Bolton, L., Wright, J. (eds) Lasting Screen Stars. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40733-7_15

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