Dame Florence Marjorie Wilcox (née Robertson; 20 October 1904 – 3 June 1986), known professionally as Anna Neagle, was an English stage and film actress, singer, and dancer.

In her historical dramas, Neagle was renowned for her portrayals of British historical figures, including Nell Gwyn (Nell Gwyn, 1934), Queen Victoria (Victoria the Great, 1937 and Sixty Glorious Years, 1938), Edith Cavell (Nurse Edith Cavell, 1939), and Florence Nightingale (The Lady with a Lamp, 1951).

Forming a professional alliance with Wilcox, Neagle played her first starring film role in the musical Goodnight, Vienna (1932), again with Jack Buchanan.

[5] Neagle had her first major success with Nell Gwyn (1934), which Wilcox had previously shot as a silent starring Dorothy Gish in 1926.

Neagle's performance as Gwyn, who became the mistress of Charles II (played by Cedric Hardwicke) prompted some censorship in the United States.

The Hays Office had Wilcox add an (historically false) scene featuring the two leads getting married and also a "framing" story resulting in an entirely different ending.

The film, with a script featuring a contribution from Herman J. Mankiewicz (later to co-write Citizen Kane with Orson Welles), had Neagle performing her own high-wire acrobatics.

The script by Robert Vansittart and Miles Malleson (from Laurence Housman's play Victoria Regina) alternated between the political and the personal lives of the royal couple.

Victoria the Great was such an international success that it resulted in Neagle and Walbrook playing their roles again in an all-Technicolor sequel entitled Sixty Glorious Years (1938), co-starring C. Aubrey Smith as the Duke of Wellington.

While the first of these films was in release, Neagle returned to the London stage and entertained audiences with her portrayal of the title role in Peter Pan.

Their first American film was Nurse Edith Cavell (1939), a remake of Dawn, a Wilcox silent that starred Sybil Thorndike.

It included a Technicolor sequence, which featured Neagle singing the play's most famous song, "Alice Blue Gown".

Neagle and Wilcox's final American film was Forever and a Day (1943), a tale of a London family house from 1804 to the 1940 blitz.

This film boasts 80 performers (mostly expatriate British), including Ray Milland, C. Aubrey Smith, Claude Rains, Charles Laughton, and – among the few North Americans – Buster Keaton.

Wilcox directed the sequence featuring Neagle, Milland, Smith, and Rains, while other directors who worked on the film included René Clair, Edmund Goulding, Frank Lloyd, Victor Saville, and Robert Stevenson.

Despite the fact that Neagle was some eight years senior than Wilding, they proved to be an extremely bankable romantic pairing at the British box office.

[6] By now, Neagle was at her peak as Britain's top box-office actress, and she made what reputedly became her own favourite film, Odette (1950), co-starring Trevor Howard, Peter Ustinov, and Marius Goring.

In the film, she plays an actress knocked out by a bomb, who dreams she is Queen Victoria and Nell Gwyn, as well as her own mother.

Although Neagle performed several musical numbers for the film, most of them were cut from the final release, leaving her with essentially a supporting role.

Set in a children's hospital, the film features Neagle as a matron dealing with the problems of the patients and the staff, notably a nurse (Syms) infatuated with one of the doctors (George Baker).

[6] With her husband, Neagle began producing films starring Frankie Vaughan, but these were out of touch with changing tastes, and lost money, resulting in Wilcox going heavily into debt.

Later, in 1975, she replaced Celia Johnson in The Dame of Sark and, in 1978 (the year after her husband's death), she was acting in Most Gracious Lady, which was written for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

In addition, Neagle also appeared briefly as herself in a documentary short entitled The Volunteer (1943), and served as narrator for the films The Prams Break Through (1945) and Princess's Wedding Day (1947).

Neagle also produced, but did not appear in, three films starring Frankie Vaughan: These Dangerous Years (1957), Wonderful Things (1957), and The Heart of a Man (1959).

[22] Annual polls of British exhibitors for the Motion Picture Herald consistently listed Neagle as a leading box office star in her home country.