. Muriel Lilian Pavlow, actor, born 27 June 1921; died 19 January 2019. Her father was a Russian émigré and her mother was Swiss-French, she iwll be remembered as a quintessential British heroine on stage and screen. This meant being well spoken and standing by her man through thick and thin, particularly in the staid England of the 1950s. As a J Arthur Rank contract player, she waited for pilots Alec Guinness in Malta Story (1953) and Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky (1956) to return safely from missions during the second world war, and was the steadfast nurse who loves accident-prone Simon Sparrow (Dirk Bogarde), the medical student in Doctor in the House (1954) – the first in the popular series – and Doctor at Large (1957). In the theatre, Pavlow was generally a “nice gel” in well-made West End productions, often touring the UK and beyond.
She was born in Lewisham, London, to Boris Pavlov, a salesman, and his wife, Germaine. They changed their name to Pavlow to sound more British. She grew up in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, and went to school locally. She started acting at an early age and her first, brief, film appearance came at the age of 13 in the Gracie Fields morale-boosting musical Sing As We Go! (1934).and co-starred three years later in Hansel and Gretel, a pioneer BBC television broadcast, After this she was cast as a young girl in Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus (1938), with John Gielgud and Marie Tempest at the Queen’s theatre, London. “I was 17 or 18 and still playing children,” Pavlow recalled. “I was afraid I was going to play children for the rest of my career, until John Gielgud said to me while we were waiting in the wings, ‘I read a very good play today by John Van Druten and I said to Binkie [Beaumont, the theatre impresario], “You ought to cast Muriel as the girl.” It’s all right, it’s not a child, it’s an ingenue role!’”The play was Old Acquaintance (1941), starring Edith Evans, at the Apollo. While appearing in the play in the evenings, she was shooting Quiet Wedding (1941) during the day. However, the role in the latter was a small one, as a teenage bridesmaid. Directed by Anthony Asquith, the romantic comedy starred Margaret Lockwood and Derek Farr, whom Pavlow married in 1947, and with whom she often starred.
During the war she joined the Wrens, Her postwar career began with Terence Rattigan’s drawing-room comedy While the Sun Shines (1945), opposite Hubert Gregg at the Globe, and in the spy film Night Train to Dublin (1946), as an Austrian helping secret agent Robert Newton track down a Nazi spy. In 1947, after playing Ophelia to John Byron’s Hamlet on TV, she appeared as the sweet, musical daughter of shady antiques dealer Oscar Homolka in the blackmail thriller The Shop at Sly Corner. With Farr as her fiance, Pavlow had nothing much more to do than pretend to play the violin in long shot.
It was in the 50s, with her Rank contract, her film career blossomed with It Started in Paradise (1952), about rival dress designers, According to the New York Times critic, in contrast to the scheming Jane Hylton, “pretty Miss Pavlow is as straight and as neat as a well-stitched seam”.
Her next leading role was as a Maltese girl, working in the British war operations room, in love with Guinness’s RAF pilot in Malta Story (1953). At the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1954 she played Cressida to Laurence Harvey’s Troilus in Glen Byam Shaw’s production, as well as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Bianca in both The Taming of the Shrew and Othello.
She played opposite John Gregson in Conflict of Wings (1954), In the inspiring biopic Reach for the Sky (1956), Pavlow was Thelma, the supportive wife of the pilot Douglas Bader (Kenneth More). In Rooney (1958), set in Dublin, she is a single woman secretly in love with a happy-go-lucky dustman (Gregson). Having left Rank, Pavlow appeared in Murder She Said (1961), the first of four Miss Marple whodunnits starring Margaret Rutherford. In it, Pavlow played dictatorial James Robertson Justice’s long-suffering daughter. It was to be her last film, apart for her cameo in Stephen Poliakoff’s starry Glorious 39 (2009). After this, she was semi-retired, occasionally popping up in television series such as The Bill (1993), The Rector’s Wife (1994) and House of Cards (1995).
