The Shopgirl's Dream

The statuette, known as a "silver lady," looked very much like a female Hollywood Oscar. The radiant young lady who clasped it looked, in her gown of turquoise slipper satin and black lace, like a composite photograph of Merle Oberon and Joan Bennett. For the third successive year, Margaret Lockwood last week shakily thanked British moviegoers for electing her Britain's most popular cinemactress. (John Mills, star of Great Expectations, was voted most popular cinemactor; Anna Neagle's The Courtneys of Curzon Street, the most popular film.)

England's "Oscars" are chosen by moviegoers (polled by the London Daily Mail) instead of by their fellow workers, as in Hollywood. What is it about "dear Maggie" that makes her "the British shopgirl's dream?" She is no great beauty; her nose is sharp, her lips are thin, a large mole guards her left eye. And she is no great actress; most critics agree that ordinary is the word for Maggie's histrionics. Apparently, that's what makes her popular. Said a British producer: "She is really one of them. They feel that whatever happens to her on the screen might easily happen to them."

Though Maggie was born in Karachi, India, she was brought up in lower-middle-class South London. At Italia Conti's dramatic school for children, where Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence studied, Maggie got her start as a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The rising curve of Maggie's film career has suffered only two minor lapses: 1) a flop in her one try at Hollywood, where Maggie supported Shirley Temple in Susanna of the Mounties, and "didn't know what I was supposed to do"; and 2) an unsuccessful marriage to a London broker, which, however, produced a daughter called "Toots." At seven, Toots has already appeared in two of her mother's films, gets a sack or two of Maggie's weekly silo of fan mail.

Maggie did her best acting in Alfred Hitchcock's unforgettable The Lady Vanishes, but it was a forgettable film, The Wicked Lady, that set her on top of the heap. Maggie's current (and 25th) picture, I Know You ("Margaret, a member of the British Embassy staff in Rio de Janeiro, falls in love with a plausible rascal . . ."), is a fair sample of what she has been doing since Wicked Lady.

From such stuff, Cinemogul J. Arthur Rank makes a right fat slice of his film earnings; for doing it, Maggie Lockwood makes about -L-30,000 a year--probably top money among British stars. Says she (with a blunt dig at stage-struck British stars who think they're slumming when they make pictures): "I am not one of those who is always dissatisfied with what she is doing."

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