Introduction
Mary Lilian Agnes Morris (13 December 1915 – 14 October 1988) was a British actress.
Life and career
Morris was the daughter of Herbert Stanley Morris, a botanist, and his wife Sylvia Ena de Creft-Harford. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Morris made her stage debut in Lysistrata at the Gate Theatre, London in 1935. In 1943 she played Anna Petrovitch in the Ealing war movie Undercover as the wife of a Serbian guerrilla leader, and appeared in many British films of the 1930s and 1940s. On television, she played Professor Madeleine Dawnay in the science-fiction television drama A for Andromeda (and its sequel, The Andromeda Breakthrough), and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (as part of the BBC's adaptation of Shakespeare's Roman plays, The Spread of the Eagle) in 1963.
As a Number Two in the The Prisoner episode "Dance of the Dead" she dressed as Peter Pan during a masquerade ball. After a 25-year absence she reappeared in films as the mother of the murdered boy in the 1977 horror film Full Circle. She also appeared on television in Doctor Who in the story Kinda (1982), playing the pivotal role of the shaman Panna opposite Peter Davison.
Her other television appearances included the Countess Vronsky in the BBC's Anna Karenina (1977), the macabre, ancient relative in the Walter de la Mare story Seaton's Aunt (1983) in Granada Television's Shades of Darkness series, and the formidable matriarch in Police at the Funeral, an adaptation of one of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion stories for the BBC's Campion (1989).
Death
She died from heart failure on 14 October 1988 in Aigle, Switzerland.
Filmography
- Victoria the Great (1937)
- Prison Without Bars (1938)
- The Spy in Black (1939)
- The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
- Major Barbara (1941)
- "Pimpernel" Smith (1941)
- Undercover (1943)
- The Agitator (1945)
- The Man from Morocco (1945)
- Train of Events (1949)
- High Treason (1951)
- Full Circle (1977)
Selected television appearances
- The Philco Television Playhouse
- An Age of Kings
- Interpol Calling
- A for Andromeda
- The Andromeda Breakthrough
- Ghost Squad
- Thirty-Minute Theatre
- The Prisoner
- Theatre 625
- Men of Iron
- Play of the Month
- An Unofficial Rose
- Ballet Shoes
- Play for Today
- Full Circle
- Anna Karenina
- King Richard the Second
- Doctor Who
- Diana
- The Life and Death of King John
- The Ray Bradbury Theater
- Campion