Joan Greenwood

She played Sibella in the 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets, and also appeared in The Man in the White Suit, Young Wives' Tale (both 1951), The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), Stage Struck (1958), Tom Jones (1963) and Little Dorrit (1987).

Greenwood worked mainly on the stage, where she had a long career, appearing with Donald Wolfit's theatre company in the years following the Second World War.

She opened The Grass Is Greener in the West End in 1952, and played Gwendolen in a film version of The Importance of Being Earnest released in the same year.

She had leading roles in Stage Struck (1958) and then in Mysterious Island (1961), an adaptation of a Jules Verne novel; and was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for Tom Jones (1963).

She played Ophelia in Hamlet with the Donald Wolfit company, Nora in A Doll's House, Celia in Volpone and Sabina in The Young Wives' Tale.

[7] Sydney Box offered her a seven-year contract with the Rank Organisation, starting with the female lead in A Girl in a Million (1946).

Greenwood was cast in the lead role of Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), as Sophia Dorothea of Celle, alongside Stewart Granger, but it was an expensive box-office failure.

[8] She did The Importance of Being Earnest (1949) for TV; then played Lady Caroline Lamb in The Bad Lord Byron (1949), a notorious flop.

She did another for Ealing with Mackendrick and Guinness, The Man in the White Suit, then Young Wives' Tale (both 1951) and did The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) again, this time as a feature film.

In the late 1950s she worked increasingly on TV, in versions of Man and Superman, Ann Veronica, Hedda Gabler and The Grass is Greener.

She appeared as Olga, alongside Spike Milligan in Frank Dunlop's production of the play Oblomov, based on the novel by Russian writer Ivan Goncharov.

[citation needed] Later roles included The Uncanny (1977), The Water Babies (1978), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), Bognor (1981), Triangle (1982), and Ellis Island (1985).

[13] She played Lady Carlton, a quirky romance novelist and the landlady to the main characters, in the British sitcom Girls on Top (1985–86).

On 28 February 1987, nine years after her husband's death, Greenwood died from acute bronchitis and asthma[3] at her home in London.