Sally Gray

Constance Vera Browne, Baroness Oranmore and Browne (née Stevens; 14 February 1915 – 24 September 2006), commonly known as Sally Gray, was an English film actress of the 1930s and 1940s. Her obituary in The Irish Times described her as "once seen as a British rival to Ginger Rogers."

Born Constance Vera Stevens in Holloway, London, Gray was the daughter of Charles Stevens, who drove a motor cab, and his wife, Gertrude Grace. Her mother was a ballet dancer and her grandmother was a "principal boy" in the 1870s.

Gray made her stage debut at the age of twelve in All God's Chillun at the Globe Theatre in London, playing a black boy.

She then went back to school for two years, training at Fay Compton’s School of Dramatic Art, during which time she performed in cabarets. She later became well established in the theatre before embarking on a series of light comedies, musicals and thrillers in the 1930s.

Gray began in films in her teens with a bit part in School for Scandal (1930) and returned in 1935, making nearly twenty films, culminating in her sensitive role in Brian Desmond Hurst’s romantic melodrama Dangerous Moonlight (1941). The same year she appeared in the West End musical Lady Behave which had been written by her co-star Stanley Lupino. She was off the screen for several years owing to a nervous breakdown.

She returned to the screen in 1946 and made her strongest bid for stardom in a series of melodramas. They include the hospital thriller Green for Danger (1946), Carnival (1946), and The Mark of Cain (1948). She made two films that, in different ways, capture some of the essence of postwar Britain: Alberto Cavalcanti's They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) (as a gangster's moll) and the stagebound Silent Dust (1948). She also appeared in Edward Dmytryk's film noir piece Obsession (1949), in which she plays Robert Newton’s faithless wife. Her final film was the spy yarn Escape Route (1952).

RKO executives, impressed with Gray, authorised producer William Sistrom to offer her a long-term contract if she would move to the United States. John Paddy Carstairs, director of The Saint in London, also thought she could be a star. However, she declined the offer and instead retired in 1952 after getting married.

Gray married The 4th Baron Oranmore and Browne, an Anglo-Irish peer, on December 1, 1951, and lived in County Mayo, Ireland. The couple kept the marriage secret until the 1953 coronation, at which she appeared with her husband.

In the early 1960s, they returned to England and settled in a flat in Eaton Place, Belgravia, London. The couple had no children.

Gray died on September 24, 2006, at 91 years of age, in London, England.

Film