Never a big star but still name above the title. And what a lengthy and productive career.
She was born Joan Boniface Winnifrith in Kent in 1913, the daughter of an English rector and the goddaughter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Despite family pedigrees, Anna Lee was encouraged to be an actress, and found herself as a teenager in the early Thirties onstage in England and making films.
Her career extended from 1932 to pretty much right up until she died (at age 91) in 2004. Contemporary audiences probably best remember Lee as wealthy matriarch and voice of reason (Lila Quartermain) in General Hospital, one of the most popular and influential daytime soap operas ever.
The series began on ABC in 1963, and is still running (although production was paused during the covid pandemic). Lee joined the cast in 1978, soon after she was left paralyzed from the waist down after a serious auto accident. She carried on, staying with General Hospital for more than two decades. Her character was finally killed off (death while sleeping) in 2003, the year before her actual death.
Lee’s Hollywood career began in the late Thirties when with World War II looming, she and her first of three husbands, Robert Stevenson, emigrated. She was foolishly dubbed back then as “The British Bombshell.”
Among her notable films were three directed by John Ford, How Green Was My Valley, Two Rode Together and Fort Apache. (There she is below with the Duke in the latter.)
We enjoyed her rambunctious performance in producer extaordinaire Val Lewton’s 1946 horror-thriller, Bedlam, opposite Boris Karloff.
Also, Lee sparked up 1943’s Hangmen Also Die, directed by Fritz Lang.
Lee did her best in the 1959 policier, The Crimson Kimono directed by Sam Fuller. But her turn as a wise, hard-drinking, seen-it-all denizen of the urban demimonde, doesn’t quite work. More Fuller’s lapse than Lee’s. (There she is below with costar Victoria Shaw.)
Here she is as Nazi-thwarting Sister Margaretta in 1965’s The Sound of Music.
And, as the neighbor to Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Anna Lee — what a long and lustrous career.
I was smitten by Anna Lee in How Green Was My Valley and agree with your description of her “rambunctious” performance in Bedlam. She had an almost unique, porcelain beauty. Had never heard of her disability or that her daughter married Don Everly.
Always something fun in ClassicMovieChat.
Oh, I just noticed the ring on Miss Lee’s right hand as Sister Margaretta. Not unusual I guess, but I wonder if it was overlooked during filming. I’m sure the answer can be she is a bride of Christ, and she is presumably Austrian, where wedding rings are worn on the right hand. Good enough for me.
I don’t recall if she was supposed to be a widow in “Baby Jane”, but no ring on either hand in that photo.
OK, back to the present day…
I need to slow down. Miss Lee IS wearing a ring on her left hand in the Baby Jane shot.
I stand corrected. And look forward to a visit with the eye doctor when the office reopens.
Mrs Quartermaine!