Films starring Googie Withers on DVD and Blu-ray

Films starring Googie Withers

In November 2004, Granada had to issue an apology after Norris Cole tutted in an episode of Coronation Street that `Googie Withers would turn in her grave.' In fact, the then-87 year-old was hale and hearty and living in Sydney. Indeed, just two years earlier, she had returned to the West End, 73 years after her debut, to appear in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan at the Haymarket.

Born on 12 March 1917 in Karachi, which was then part of the Raj, Georgette Lizette Withers was the daughter of a British sailor and a Dutch mother. Five years after the family returned home, the 12 year-old enrolled at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts and made her stage bow as a dancer in 1929. She entered films when Michael Powell offered her work as an extra and she found herself taking the key role of Sally in The Girl in the Crowd (1934) when the original actress was fired.

Withers made three more quota quickies with Powell and fitted in a cameo in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) between co-starring in comedies with Will Hay (Convict 99, 1938) and George Formby (Trouble Brewing, 1939). But it was during the war years that her distinctive blend of alert naturalism and assured sensuality found its niche, most notably as Dutch patriots Jo de Vries and Hel�ne van Leyden in Powell and Pressburger's One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1941) and Vernon Sewell's The Silver Fleet (1943). She even found time to team with Arthur Askey in Herbert Mason's comic flagwaver Back-Room Boy (1942).

Having survived buying fianc� Michael Relph a cursed mirror in Ealing's supernatural portmanteau, Dead of Night (1945), Withers revealed a darker side, as she excelled as the Victorian landlady attempting to dupe lovesick Gordon Jackson into murdering her husband in Robert Hamer's Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945) and the scheming wife out to exploit wrestling promoter Richard Widmark in Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950). However, she also had the tenacity to struggle against the odds, as she did while hiding a fugitive ex-lover from her East End family in Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday, running a sheep farm in Charles Frend's The Loves of Joanna Godden (both 1947) and helping fellow medic James Donald with his penicillin research in Pat Jackson's White Corridors (1951) - the last two of which are long overdue DVD release.

However, at the peak of her powers, Withers followed actor husband John McCallum (the creator of Skippy who sadly died this month) to Australia, returning memorably to play governor Faye Boswell in 42 episodes of LWT's acclaimed prison drama, Within These Walls (1974-78). Remaining active on stage and television, Withers appeared in small-screen adaptations of Northanger Abbey and Hotel du Lac (1986) and delighted as writer Katharine Prichard, who befriends Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush in Scott Hicks's David Helfgott biopic, Shine (1996).

In 2001, Withers received a CBE. But British screen scholars have still fully to recognise what a daring and distinctive talent she really was. [-]

Highlights