Mary Morris

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BIRTHDAY

December 13, 1915

DIED

October 14, 1988

RECENT CREDITS

The Thief of Bagdad (FILM) Jan. 1, 1940

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BIOGRAPHY

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Mary Morris -- not to be confused with the similarly named American actress -- was a busy actress in England across four decades, primarily in the theater, interspersed with a lot of work on British television and the occasional film role. Born in the Fiji Islands in 1915, she was educated in England, and was bitten by the acting bug before age ten. By 20, she'd landed her first professional role in Lysistrata at the Gate Theatre. She concentrated on the stage throughout her career over the next 40 years -- slight in stature, and dark-complexioned, with wide, expressive eyes and a deep, powerfully expressive voice, she aimed herself at a huge range of parts, counting Juliet, Cleopatra, and Saint Joan among her favorites but also encompassing works such as John Masefield's The Witch. And according to the London Times, she turned Peter Pan from J.M. Barrie's work into something "quite frightening."
On film, she played onto a tiny handful of roles, starting for producer Alexander Korda in the late '30s, in The Spy in Black (1939) and much more prominently in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), in which she played both Halima, a villainous confederate of the evil vizier portrayed by Conrad Veidt, and the sinister, murderous mechanical "Silver Maid." She also worked for Leslie Howard in the actor/director's thriller Pimpernel Smith (1941). Morris appeared in dozens of dramas on British television, in between her theater commitments, and her best-known part on the small-screen was in an episode of The Prisoner entitled "Dance of the Dead," in which she played "Number Two," the sinister operational head of "The Village" in which the hero is trapped; at one point in that episode, there is a costume ball in which Morris got to briefly revive her notably dark and sinister version of Peter Pan.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

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