13 Facts About Margaretta Scott

Margaretta Mary Winifred Scott was an English stage, screen and television actress whose career spanned over seventy years.

Margaretta Scott is best remembered for playing the eccentric widow Mrs Pumphrey in the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small.

Margaretta Scott trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she was a classmate of Celia Johnson.

Margaretta Scott began acting as a child, giving private performances of verse-speaking and dance drama to entertain her family and friends.

Margaretta Scott became a leading exponent of the work of William Shakespeare through a series of notable performances in the early and mid-1930s: Cast firstly as the Player Queen and then Ophelia in Hamlet, she followed this with Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing for the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

Margaretta Scott appeared as Viola at the New Theatre and as Ophelia and Juliet in a couple of BBC radio productions in 1932.

Margaretta Scott played Lavinia in George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion with the rehearsals under the supervision of the author himself.

In 1936 Margaretta Scott was cast as Rosaline in one of the great productions of Love's Labours Lost at the Old Vic and in the following year performed in more Shakespeare which included her last appearance at the Open Air Theatre until 1984 in Ring Round the Moon.

Margaretta Scott was a signatory of the document that established Equity, the British actors' trade union, in 1934.

Margaretta Scott was one of the first women to perform Shakespeare on television, in the role of Beatrice in a stage production of Much Ado About Nothing broadcast by the BBC in 1937.

For twenty-five years, from the 1970s, Margaretta Scott played a number of distinguished parts in popular television dramas.

Margaretta Scott was married to the English composer John Wooldridge, who was killed in a car accident in 1958.

Margaretta Scott died from pneumonia and breast cancer at her home in London on 15 April 2005, aged 93, and is buried with her husband, John, at St Lawrence's Church, Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire.