Toast to a real heroine
She left the film world when she was at the height of stardom to serve the wounded during World War II. Britain recently raised a memorial honouring Madeleine Carroll’s life and achievements
She was the first of Alfred Hitchcock’s ice-cool blondes when she starred in the thriller The 39 Steps and went on to become the highest-paid actress of her age. But when her sister was killed in the Blitz, Madeleine Carroll lost the taste for movies. She began volunteering for the Red Cross during the war and later became an activecampaigner for children through the United Nations’ agency Unicef.
Honoured by the French with the Legion d’Honneur and the Americans with a Medal of Freedom presented by President Harry S Truman, her life and work went unrecognised in Britain - until now. Last month, around 500 people turned out for the unveiling of a `A37,000 commemorative monument to the actress-turned-war nurse in her hometown of West Bromwich in the Midlands.
It was the triumphant end to a two-year campaign by Terry Price, 68, an amateur historian who had been staggered to discover the full story of the local star when he was researching his latest book, West Bromwich Memories. "I obviously knew of her film career - my mother and father always told me about it. But I didn’t realise until I started the research about all her humanitarian work," he said. "At the peak of her career, in 1943, she volunteered for the Red Cross and went overseas to Europe and stayed there with the troops working as a nurse until the war ended.
"She gave her chateau in France to be an orphanage and funded another one after the war. She was one of the first ambassadors for Unicef. But she was a very private person and didn’t give interviews and I think probably she put some of the media off." It was "absolutely wonderful" to see her recognised at last, he said. "It’s a very emotional time for me to think that someone who has been honoured all over the world but forgotten by this country and by West Bromwich for 60 years has now been formally recognised." The unveiling came just a few days short of what would have been the star’s 101st birthday.
Madeleine Carroll, who died in Spain of pancreatic cancer in 1987, was born in West Bromwich 81 years earlier, in 1906. She was the elder of two daughters to an Irish professor of languages and his French wife. The professor intended she should be a French teacher but his daughter fell for drama instead when she won a part in a student play while at Birmingham University.
"Somehow I did it as if I had been acting all my life," she said later. "I understood then how people get ‘a call’." Her beauty and sophistication soon won Carroll parts in three silent movies but it was her speaking voice, honed in elocution lessons while at school, that secured her fame when the "talkies" arrived. She rapidly rose to fame in films, including Madame Guillotine and The Kissing Cup Race and by 1931 she was the top female star in Britain.
She briefly retired after marrying a member of the Kings Guards, Philip Astley, but returned two years later with Sleeping Cars opposite Ivor Novello and the hit I Was a Spy. With offers flooding in from Hollywood, Carroll made her US debut in a John Ford film, The World Moves On. But it was when Alfred Hitchcock cast her in The 39 Steps in 1935 that she secured her place in film history.
Handcuffed to her handsome co-star, Robert Donat, and trading double entendres, she — and the film — was a sensation. More productions followed until by 1938 she was among the highest paid stars in the industry, making more than $250,000 a year. Her co-stars included Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and Bob Hope. She married another of her leading men, Sterling Hayden, after divorcing Astley. She also became a popular guest on radio programmes, whose listeners were won over by her beautiful speaking voice.
But when war broke out and her sister, Marguerite, known as Guigette, was killed in the London bombings, Carroll agitated to get out of her film contracts. The death played "a significant part" in her desire to join the war effort, Price said. "She volunteered for overseas work as soon as she was released from her contract and she did fund-raising work for charity in the intervening years." As a Red Cross volunteer, she served in France and in Italy, treating wounded American airmen, taking the name Madeline Hamilton to mask her fame.
After the war, she stayed in Europe, making radio programmes designed to improve Franco-American relations and helped in the rehabilitation of concentration camp victims — through which she met her third husband, Henri Loveral. They were not married long. She returned to film-making, made her Broadway debut and wed, for a fourth time, the publisher of Life magazine, Andrew Heiskell, with whom she had a daughter,Anna Madeleine.
Her focus was increasingly on children. Following her experience of the devastation in Europe, she proposed a resolution to the American committee of Unicef that there should be an International Children’s Day and made impassioned speeches for child rights in what she called "a one-woman children’s crusade".
Later in life, she was asked about her career which included 43 films, enough to warrant a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. "Movies?" she said. "Just say I got out when the going was good." Terry Price thought this was a story that should be told. He gave his own money towards the statue and persuaded Adrian Bailey, the town’s MP, to raise the profile of the forgotten star in Parliament as long ago as July 2005. —
By arrangement with The Independent
