Madeleine Carroll

The director stated, "how very well Madeleine fitted into the part. I had heard a lot about her as a tall, cold, blonde beauty. After meeting her, I made up my mind to present her to the public as her natural self". She played another Hitchcock blonde in Secret Agent (1936). She is also noted for largely abandoning her acting career after the death of her sister Marguerite in the London Blitz to devote herself to helping wounded servicemen and children displaced or maimed by the war. She was awarded both the Legion d'Honneur and the Medal of Freedom for her work with the Red Cross.

• Name — Madeleine Carroll • Born — 26 February 1906 • Birthplace — West Bromwich, Staffordshire, England • Died — 2 October 1987 • Place of death — Marbella, Spain • Resting Place — Sant Antoni de Calonge • Birth Name — Edith Madeleine Carroll • Years Active — 1928–1955 • Occupation — Actress • Children — 1 • Awards — Legion of Honour (1946) • Education — University of Birmingham

Carroll was born at 32 Herbert Street (now number 44) in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, daughter of John O'Carroll, an Irish professor of languages from County Limerick, and Helene, his French wife. She graduated from the University of Birmingham, with a B.A. degree in languages. While at university she appeared in some productions for the Birmingham University Dramatic Society. She was a French mistress at a girls' school in Hove for a year.

Carroll's father opposed her taking up acting, but with her mother's support she quit teaching and traveled to London to look for stage work. She had won a beauty contest, and got a job in Seymour Hicks' touring company, making her stage debut in 1927 in The Lash. The following year she made her screen debut in The Guns of Loos, and then starred alongside Miles Mander in The First Born, written by Alma Reville. Thence she met Reville's husband, Alfred Hitchcock.

• Illustration — Carroll and Robert Donat in The 39 Steps (1935) Carroll attracted the attention of Alfred Hitchcock and in 1935 starred as the director's earliest prototypical cool, glib, intelligent blonde in The 39 Steps. Based on the espionage novel by John Buchan, the film became a sensation and with it so did Carroll. Cited by The New York Times for a performance that was "charming and skillful", Carroll became very much in demand. Of Hitchcock heroines as exemplified by Carroll, film critic Roger Ebert wrote: The female characters in his films reflected the same qualities over and over again: They were blonde. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerised the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps. Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated. The filmmaker and actor Orson Welles called the film a "masterpiece" and screenwriter Robert Towne remarked, "It's not much of an exaggeration to say that all contemporary escapist entertainment begins with The 39 Steps." At the end of the century it was ranked fourth in the BFI Top 100 British films. Following on from this success Hitchcock wanted to re-team Carroll with her 39 Steps co-star Robert Donat the following year in Secret Agent, a spy thriller based on a work by W. Somerset Maugham. However, Donat's recurring health problems intervened, resulting in a Carroll–John Gielgud pairing. In between the films she made a short drama The Story of Papworth (1935).

• Illustration — Ronald Colman and Madeleine Carroll in The Prisoner of Zenda, 1937 Achieving international stardom with The 39 Steps, Carroll was the first British beauty to be offered a major American film contract. She accepted a lucrative deal with Paramount Pictures and was cast opposite George Brent in The Case Against Mrs. Ames (1936). She followed this with The General Died at Dawn (1936), and was borrowed by 20th Century Fox to play the female lead in Lloyd's of London (1936) which made a star of Tyrone Power. She stayed at the studio to make On the Avenue (1937), a musical with Dick Powell and Alice Faye. Carroll went to Columbia for It's All Yours (1937) then was cast by David O. Selznick as Ronald Colman's love interest in the 1937 box-office success The Prisoner of Zenda. Walter Wanger put her in Blockade (1938) with Henry Fonda, about the Spanish Civil War. Back at Paramount she made some comedies with Fred MacMurray, Cafe Society (1939) and Honeymoon in Bali (1939). Edward Small gave her top billing in My Son, My Son! (1940) with Aherne. She starred in Safari (1940) then played against Gary Cooper in North West Mounted Police (1940), directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Paramount put Carroll opposite MacMurray in Virginia (1941) and One Night in Lisbon (1941). Virginia also starred Sterling Hayden who was reteamed with Carroll in Bahama Passage (1941). Carroll was Bob Hope's love interest in My Favorite Blonde (1942).

On radio, Carroll was a participant in The Circle (1939) on NBC, discussing "current events, literature and drama" each week. In 1944, she was the host of This Is the Story, an anthology series dramatising famous novels on the Mutual Broadcasting System. At the tail end of radio's golden age, Carroll starred in the NBC soap opera The Affairs of Dr. Gentry (1957–59). She also was one of a group of four stars who rotated in taking the lead in each week's episode of The NBC Radio Theater (1959). In 1948 she made her debut on Broadway as Agatha Reed in Fay Kanin's Goodbye, My Fancy; a role later portrayed by Joan Crawford in the 1951 film adaptation.

Carroll returned to Britain after the war. She was in White Cradle Inn (1947). She went back to the US and was reunited with MacMurray for An Innocent Affair (1948). Her last film was The Fan (1949).

• Illustration — Mrs Philip Astley, née Madeleine Carroll by Philip Alexius de László (oil on canvas, circa 1935); one of at least two portraits of Carroll by de László Carroll married her first husband, Colonel Philip Reginald Astley, in 1931; they divorced in 1939. He was an estate agent, big-game hunter and soldier. In 1941, she starred opposite Sterling Hayden in Virginia. The following year they married, divorcing in 1946. After her only sister, Marguerite, was killed in World War II's London Blitz, Carroll made a radical shift from acting to working in field hospitals as a Red Cross nurse. Having become a naturalised American citizen in 1943, she served at the American Army Air Force's 61st Station Hospital in Foggia, Italy, in 1944, where wounded airmen flying out of air bases in the area were hospitalised. She earned the rank of captain and received the Medal of Freedom for her nursing service. Carroll first visited Spain's Costa Brava in 1934. The following year she bought an estate in Calonge, where her seaside home, Castell Madeleine, was constructed. She was prevented from living there by the Spanish Civil War and World War II and moved to Marbella in 1949. The home was later demolished, leaving one tower intact, and a housing development named after it (Urbanización Castell Madeleine). • Illustration — Red Cross workers assembled at the IP, Avenue C and 7th Street, Camp Patrick Henry, left to right, front row, are Edna Elizabeth Dick of Williamsburg, Kentucky; Madeleine Carroll; Marcia Hinrichs, Alexandria, Virginia. During the war, Carroll donated another property of hers, a château she owned outside Paris, to house more than one hundred and fifty orphans, arranging for groups of young people in California to knit clothing for them. In an RKO-Pathe News bulletin she was filmed at the château with children and staff wearing the donated clothes thanking those who contributed. She was awarded the Légion d'Honneur for her efforts by France. Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower remarked in private that, of all the movie stars he met in Europe during the war, he was most impressed with Carroll and Herbert Marshall (who worked with military amputees). After the war, Carroll stayed in Europe where she conducted a radio program fostering French-American friendship and helped in the rehabilitation of concentration camp victims, during which she met her future third husband, the French producer Henri Lavorel. In late 1946, she went briefly to Switzerland to film a British film, White Cradle Inn (aka High Fury). On her return to Paris, she and Lavorel formed a production company and made several two-reel documentaries to promote peace, one of which, Children's Republic, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Carroll told The Christian Science Monitor that "wars are started at the top but can be prevented at the bottom, if all men and women will rid themselves of distrust and suspicion of that which is foreign." Filmed in a small orphanage in the town of Sèvres, just southwest of Paris, it focused attention on the devastation of children's lives in Europe caused by war. Widely shown in Canada, it became a prime source of funds for the manufacture of artificial limbs for wounded children. In 1947, Carroll returned to the United States together with Lavorel. Their intention was for her to resume her acting career, which would fund their production company, but they soon separated. Appearing in three more films until 1949 and debuting on Broadway in 1948, Carroll then mostly retired from acting, although she did occasionally appear on television and radio until the mid-1960s. • Illustration — Carroll starred in a radio daytime drama, The Affairs of Dr. Gentry, from 1957 to 1959. She married Andrew Heiskell, publisher of Life, in 1950, and they had a daughter Anne Madeleine in 1951. They divorced in 1965. By then, Carroll had moved to Paris. She later moved to Spain, where she shared an estate with her mother and her daughter. Her mother died in 1975 and her daughter, having relocated to New York, died in 1983.

Carroll died on 2 October 1987, aged 81, in Marbella, Spain, from pancreatic cancer and is buried in the cemetery of Sant Antoni de Calonge in Catalonia.

• Illustration — PFC Hiroshi Suyao, of Honolulu, a Japanese American soldier, wounded during an attack, receives cigarettes from Carroll. Seventh Army, Dompaire area, France. 1 November 1944. 66th Hospital Train. • Year — Title — Role — Notes • 1928 — The Guns of Loos — Diana Cheswick • What Money Can Buy — Rhoda Pearson • The First Born — Lady Madeleine Boycott • Not So Stupid • 1929 — The Crooked Billet — Joan Easton • The American Prisoner — Grace Malherb • Atlantic — Monica • 1930 — The W Plan — Rosa Hartmann • Instinct • Young Woodley — Laura Simmons • French Leave — Mlle. Juliette / Dorothy Glenister • Escape — Dora • The School for Scandal — Lady Teazle • Kissing Cup's Race — Lady Molly Adair • 1931 — Madame Guillotine — Lucille de Choisigne • Fascination — Gwenda Farrell • The Written Law — Lady Margaret Rochester • 1933 — Sleeping Car — Anne • I Was a Spy — Martha Cnockhaert • 1934 — The World Moves On — Mrs. Warburton, 1825 / Mary Warburton Girard, 1914 • 1935 — The Dictator — Queen Caroline Mathilde of Denmark • The 39 Steps — Pamela • The Story of Papworth, the Village of Hope — The Introducer — Short Subject • 1936 — Secret Agent — Elsa Carrington • The Case Against Mrs. Ames — Hope Ames • The General Died at Dawn — Judy Perrie • Lloyd's of London — Lady Elizabeth • 1937 — On the Avenue — Mimi Caraway • It's All Yours — Linda Gray • The Prisoner of Zenda — Princess Flavia • 1938 — Blockade — Norma • 1939 — Cafe Society — Christopher West • Honeymoon in Bali — Gail Allen • 1940 — My Son, My Son! — Livia Vaynol • Safari — Linda Stewart • Northwest Mounted Police — April Logan • 1941 — Virginia — Charlotte Dunterry • One Night in Lisbon — Leonora Perrycoate • Bahama Passage — Carol Delbridge • 1942 — My Favorite Blonde — Karen Bentley • 1947 — White Cradle Inn — Magda • 1948 — An Innocent Affair — Paula Doane • 1949 — The Fan — Mrs. Erlynne

• Year — Program — Episode/source • 1937 — Lux Radio Theater — "Beloved Enemy" • 1938 — Lux Radio Theater — "Romance" • Lux Radio Theater — "Dangerous" • Lux Radio Theater — "Another Dawn" • 1939 — The Campbell Playhouse — "The Green Goddess" • Lux Radio Theater — "Invitation to Happiness" • 1940 — Lux Radio Theater — "My Son, My Son!" • The Campbell Playhouse — "Jane Eyre" • 1941 — Philip Morris Playhouse — "My Favorite Wife" • 1942 — Philip Morris Playhouse — "Vivacious Lady" • 1947 — Lux Radio Theater — "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir"

Her recorded language was English. She was the child of John Carroll. She married Philip Reginald Astley, Sterling Hayden and Henri Lavorel.