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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.
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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
active campaigner for children through the United Nations’ agency
Unicef.
