In 1933, Lockwood enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where she was seen by a talent scout and signed to a contract.

[3] For British Lion she was in The Case of Gabriel Perry (1935), then was in Honours Easy (1935) with Greta Nissen and Man of the Moment (1935) with Douglas Fairbanks Jnr.

Her profile rose when she appeared opposite Maurice Chevalier in The Beloved Vagabond (1936)[4] She followed it with Irish for Luck (1936) and The Street Singer (1937).

Gaumont British were making a film version of the novel Doctor Syn, starring George Arliss and Anna Lee with director Roy William Neill and producer Edward Black.

Lockwood so impressed the studio with her performance – particularly Black, who became a champion of hers – she signed a three-year contract with Gainsborough Pictures in June 1937.

[8] According to writer Alan Wood, "Many people were astonished at the contract Ted Black gave her; but when they asked him about it, he said, "She has something with which every girl in the suburbs can identify herself".

[12] Even more popular was her next movie, The Lady Vanishes, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, produced by Black and co-starring Michael Redgrave.

"[13] Hitchcock was greatly impressed by Lockwood, telling the press: She has an undoubted gift in expressing her beauty in terms of emotion, which is exceptionally well suited to the camera.

Allied to this is the fact that she photographs more than normally easily, and has an extraordinary insight in getting the feel of her lines, to live within them, so to speak, as long as the duration of the picture lasts.

[15] Gaumont British had distribution agreements with 20th Century Fox in the US and they expressed an interest in borrowing Lockwood for some films.

She was meant to make film versions of Rob Roy and The Blue Lagoon[20] but both projects were cancelled with the advent of war.

Instead, she played the role of Jenny Sunley, the self-centred, frivolous wife of Michael Redgrave's character in The Stars Look Down for Carol Reed.

But as the film progressed I found myself working with Carol Reed and Michael Redgrave again and gradually I was fascinated to see what I could put into the part.

"[12] She did another with Reed, Night Train to Munich (1940), an attempt to repeat the success of The Lady Vanishes with the same screenwriters (Launder and Gilliat) and characters of Charters and Caldicott.

She appeared in two comedies for Black: Dear Octopus (1943) with Michael Wilding from a play by Dodie Smith, which Lockwood felt was a backward step[26] and Give Us the Moon (1944), with Vic Oliver directed by Val Guest.

Lockwood was reunited with James Mason in A Place of One's Own (1945), playing a housekeeper possessed by the spirit of a dead girl, but the film was not a success.

When a proposed film about Elisabeth of Austria was cancelled,[38] she returned to the stage in a record-breaking national tour of Noël Coward's Private Lives (1949)[39] and then played the title role in productions of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan in 1949 and 1950.

"[40] She returned to film-making after an 18-month absence to star in Highly Dangerous (1950), a comic thriller in the vein of Lady Vanishes, written expressly for her by Eric Ambler and directed by Roy Ward Baker.

[44] Eventually her contract with Rank ended and she played Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion at the Edinburgh Festival of 1951.

[46] Lockwood said Wilcox and his wife Anna Neagle promised from signing the contract "I was never allowed to forget that I was a really bright and dazzling star on their horizon.

She made no more films with Wilcox who called her "a director's joy who can shade a performance or a character with computer accuracy", but he admitted their collaboration "did not come off.

[52] She was in a BBC adaptation of Christie's Spider's Web (1955), Janet Green's Murder Mistaken (1956),[a] Dodie Smith's Call It a Day (1956) and Arnold Bennett's The Great Adventure (1958).

Her subsequent long-running West End hits include an all-star production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (1965–66, in which she played the villainous Mrs Cheveley), W. Somerset Maugham's Lady Frederick (1970), Relative Values (Noël Coward revival, 1973) and the thrillers Signpost to Murder (1962) and Double Edge (1975).

This inspired the Yorkshire Television series Justice, which ran for three seasons (39 episodes) from 1971 to 1974, and featured her real-life partner John Stone as fictional boyfriend Dr Ian Moody.

Her last professional appearance was as Queen Alexandra in Royce Ryton's stage play Motherdear (Ambassadors Theatre, 1980).

[56][57] She lived her final years in seclusion in Kingston upon Thames, dying on 15 July 1990 at age 73 at the Cromwell Hospital[1][58] from cirrhosis of the liver,[59] though she was not a drinker.