Dulcie Winifred Catherine Savage Denison, (née Bailey; 20 November 1915 – 15 November 2011), known professionally as Dulcie Gray, was a British actress, mystery writer and lepidopterist.
While at drama school in the late 1930s she met a fellow student, Michael Denison. They married in 1939 and were together for 59 years before his death in 1998. The couple's professional careers were intertwined; in their early years they appeared in several films together and throughout their careers they frequently acted on stage together. Although she was well known for her starring roles in films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, most of Gray's career was in the theatre. Her range was extensive, and she appeared in Shakespeare, farce, thrillers, classics by Sheridan, Wilde, Chekhov, Shaw and Coward, absurdist drama, and numerous new plays. In the 1980s she became well known to British television viewers when she starred in a long-running soap opera, Howards' Way.
Alongside her acting career Gray was a prolific author, writing more than twenty books, mostly crime stories, but also non-crime novels, a volume of memoirs, a biography of J. B. Priestley and an award-winning book about butterflies, a lifelong interest of hers.
Life and career
Early years
Gray was born in Kuala Lumpur, British Malaya (now Malaysia) in 1915, the younger daughter and youngest of three children of Arnold Savage Bailey (1881–1935), lawyer and member of the federal council of the Federated Malay States, and his wife, Kate Edith née Clulow Gray (1887–1942). From the age of three years and three months she attended boarding schools in Wallingford, Wokingham and Swanage. At the age of fifteen she returned to Malaya, becoming a teacher and journalist. After her father's death in an accident she moved back to Britain. She won a scholarship to an art school, but transferred to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, where, in 1937, she met her future husband Michael Denison.
Gray's first professional performance was as Maria in The School for Scandal at a private theatre in Stansted Park in 1938. She became engaged to Denison in March the following year; they married in April and, as The Times put it, they "honeymooned in rep in Aberdeen". They joined A. R. Whatmore's repertory company at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, alongside colleagues including Elspeth March and Stewart Granger. The couple appeared there together in plays including Coward's Hay Fever and The Young Idea, Shaw's Arms and the Man, Priestley's Dangerous Corner and Gerald Savory's George and Margaret. In March 1940 Denison and Gray joined the H. M. Tennent Players, appearing in repertory in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
1940s
In June 1940 Denison was called up for military service in the Second World War. Gray joined a repertory company in Harrogate, appearing alongside Trevor Howard and Terence Alexander. She began broadcasting for the BBC in 1941, making 395 broadcasts in the radio soap opera Front Line Family. Her first London appearances were at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in 1942, playing Maria in Twelfth Night, Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew and Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream. At the Piccadilly Theatre later in the year she appeared as Alexandra in The Little Foxes alongside Fay Compton and Richard Attenborough. Also in 1942 she made her first film appearance in an uncredited bit part in Banana Ridge.
Her performance as Rose in the original stage adaptation of Brighton Rock at the Garrick Theatre in 1944 gave her co-star billing with Attenborough and Hermione Baddeley. The critic of the Sunday Pictorial, having praised Attenborough's performance as the vicious Pinkie, wrote, "But I hadn't reckoned on an even more amazing youngster, Dulcie Gray. Dulcie's performance as the waitress whom he marries was the loveliest, most moving thing I've seen in years". The reviewer in Punch considered that it was her "skilful and moving performance" that held the piece together. Her success in the role led to a contract with Gainsborough Pictures, for whom she made five films before the end of the war in 1945 and with them, and later other studios, she became established as a star. Among the films in which she made her name were Madonna of the Seven Moons (1945), Wanted for Murder (1946) and A Man About the House (1947).