DULCIE GRAY:ALTHOUGH AS an actor in films of the 1940s she was best known in ladylike and thoroughly English-rose types of role, Dulcie Gray, who has died aged 95, had a background and overall career that was more cosmopolitan and interesting than that might suggest.
She was in some ways the more complex half of the successful marital and professional stage and film partnership of Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray.
In The Glass Mountain(1949), in which a married composer loves an Italian girl who saved his life during the second World War, Gray, then one of the great stars of the British film industry, almost inevitably played the wronged but agonisingly understanding English wife. The part of the composer was taken by Denison, with whom Gray starred on stage and screen so many times that the Denisons became one of the "royal families" of the British entertainment scene.
Their partnership spanned the war and postwar years. It was still going strong into the 1990s with the revival of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband,in which they both appeared and in which they made their Broadway debut together in 1996.
Gray had by then found renewed screen fame on BBC television in the cast of the glossy yachting drama Howards' Way,in which she took the role of Kate Harvey from 1985 to 1990. She was also a playwright and prolific author of crime novels.
She was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the daughter of lawyer Arnold Bailey. She adopted the surname Gray from her mother, Kate. Although she often gave her year of birth as 1920, Gray much later admitted that “the fib began in the Forties when studios insisted on making you younger”.
She moved to England at the age of three and went to school at Wallingford, Wokingham and Swanage, before working as a school teacher and as a journalist in Kuala Lumpur, then returning to England on a cargo boat in 1937, with only £4 and her luggage.
Living on 6d a day for food and often going hungry, she studied at the Webber Douglas school in London, where she met Denison.
In 1939, with the second World War in the offing, she married him and started with him on the same day in Aberdeen repertory – the week after their wedding.
Her first appearance was as Sorel Bliss, the ingenue in Hay Fever,at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen.
Denison and Gray first played opposite one another as Charles Stewart Parnell and Kitty O'Shea in the play Parnell.From Aberdeen, Gray went on to rep at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Harrogate.
During the war she was most widely known through her film and radio work, which included 395 performances in Front Line Family– a saga of genteel folk coping against Hitler.
In the years following the war, she was in some of the longest-running West End productions of the light comedies that were in vogue until the arrival of the more permissive 1960s and 1970s. Then she also began to tackle more heavyweight material, such as The Cherry Orchard(1980), The Kingfisher(1980) and The Living Room(1987), and appeared in productions of An Ideal Husbandand The Importance of Being Earnest.
She wrote a play called Love Affair, which was performed and published in 1956. It toured successfully but was not a hit in London – it opened a month after the play that was to revolutionise London theatre, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger.
It was as the author of murder novels, usually with a theatre setting, that she enhanced her middle and later years. She also wrote a factual book on butterflies – one of her interests – called Butterflies On My Mind(1978).
In the 1960s, she appeared in a play with her husband in every year except one; in the 1970s, she played Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in A Murder is Announcedand was in Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce. She usually wrote at home before going to the theatre. At her peak, she produced a book a year.
Although they were not bestsellers in the Agatha Christie league, they gave her a steady income, a source of reassurance to any actor enduring the ups and downs of stage and film life.
Gray was awarded the queen's Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977; she and Denison were both appointed CBE in 1983. After her husband's death in 1998, she continued to take stage and television roles, and last appeared on screen in 2000, in the BBC drama Doctors.
She lived latterly in the actors’ care home Denville Hall, in west London.
Dulcie Gray (Dulcie Winifred Catherine Bailey): born November 20th, 1915; died November 15th, 2011