Phyllis Calvert (1915-2002) b. London, England.

British actress, who became a star in the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s. Previously she had played an effective lead to George Formby in Let George Do It! (1940), and had worked with Carol Reed on Kipps (1941) and The Young Mr Pitt (1942), but it was The Man in Grey (1943) which brought wide popular appeal.

Typecast as the virtuous victim, and caught between Margaret Lockwood’s scheming, James Mason‘s cruelty and Stewart Granger‘s swashbuckling, Calvert was able to make virtue interesting, and, in Fanny by Gaslight (1944) in particular, there is nothing insipid about her femininity. By the 1950s she was playing more varied dramatic parts, with her performance as the mother in Mandy (1952) her most satisfying role.