Her range was extensive, and she appeared in Shakespeare, farce, thrillers, classics by Sheridan, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw and Coward, absurdist drama, and numerous new plays.

Alongside her acting career Gray was a prolific author, writing more than twenty books, mostly crime stories, but also non-crime novels, a volume of memoirs, a biography of J.

They joined A. R. Whatmore's repertory company at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, alongside colleagues including Elspeth March and Stewart Granger.

[4][5] The couple appeared there together in plays including Coward's Hay Fever[6] and The Young Idea,[7] Shaw's Arms and the Man,[8] Priestley's Dangerous Corner[9] and Gerald Savory's George and Margaret.

[2] Her performance as Rose in the original stage adaptation of Brighton Rock at the Garrick Theatre in 1944 gave her co-star billing with Attenborough and Hermione Baddeley.

The critic of the Sunday Pictorial, having praised Attenborough's performance as the vicious Pinkie, wrote, "But I hadn't reckoned on an even more amazing youngster, Dulcie Gray.

When the stage version of Brighton Rock was adapted for a 1948 film, Gray was considered too old, at 32, to play the 15-year-old Rose on screen, and the part went to a younger actress.

[n 3] After a seven-week pre-London tour, beginning in August 1950, Gray and Denison opened at the Ambassadors Theatre as Michael and Agnes in The Fourposter, a two-hander, charting the married life of a couple.

[n 4] For the cinema Gray and Denison starred in The Franchise Affair (1951),[21] and in December 1951 they headed the cast in a BBC television adaptation of Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock's play Milestones.

[28] Her last stage role of the 1950s was the Duchess of Hampshire, with Denison as the Duke, in a revival of Frederick Lonsdale's Let Them Eat Cake at the Cambridge Theatre in May 1959.

[4] Back in England they starred in the opening production of the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, The Royal Gambit, a play about Henry VIII and his wives, in November 1962.

[31] In London Denison and Gray appeared in Wilde's An Ideal Husband at the Strand (December 1965) as Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern.

[33] The Stage commented: In addition to her crime novels Gray collaborated with Denison on The Actor and His World (1964), aimed at young people and explaining aspects of life in the theatrical profession.

[2] In 1970 Gray and Denison appeared in the West End in Three – a trio of one-act plays by Shaw – and then in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, and toured in a production of Pinero's farce Dandy Dick.

In the West End they appeared in Ronald Millar's A Coat of Varnish, Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1982), and Fry's Ring Round the Moon (1985 and 1988).

The Stage commented: With her husband, Gray toured the Middle East in 1985 in Ray Cooney and John Chapman's comedy There Goes the Bride.

During the decade she published three novels: The Glanville Women (1982), described as "a panoramic saga" of the lives of three generations, drawing on the author's memories of Malaya and her theatrical experiences; Anna Starr (1984), the story of a Hollywood starlet; and Mirror Image (1987), depicting the traumatic effects of an actress's obsessive love for her drama tutor.

[42] In that year the couple began a long association with Hall's production of An Ideal Husband, this time in the roles of Lady Markby and Lord Caversham.

At the Thorndike Theatre in the same year Denison again played Dr Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest but Gray switched to the role of Lady Bracknell.

[48] Gray's last stage tour alongside her husband was in 1995, with Eric Sykes in Two of a Kind, a comedy by Hugh Janes, set in a retirement home.

[49] Their final joint appearances on stage were in March and April 1998 in Curtain Up – An Evening with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

[50] The following year she toured as Madame de Rosemonde in Christopher Hampton's version of Les Liaisons dangereuses and Miss Froy in a stage adaptation of the 1938 film The Lady Vanishes.

[42] In her last years Gray lived at the actors' residential care home, Denville Hall, in west London, where she died on 15 November 2011 of bronchial pneumonia, aged 95.