1. Violette Muriel Box, Baroness Gardiner, was an English screenwriter and director, Britain's most prolific female director, having directed 12 feature films and one featurette.
13 Facts About Muriel Box
1. 2.
Violette Muriel Baker was born in Simla, Poplar Grove, New Malden, Surrey, on 22 September 1905.
3.
Muriel Box's mother had been a pupil teacher, a maid, and an assistant in a magic lantern shop.
4.
Muriel Box's father worked as a clerk for the South Western Railway at Waterloo.
5.
Muriel Box attended St Matthew's School, Tolworth, for her primary school years moving up to Holy Cross Convent in Wimbledon in 1915, but was expelled, mostly as she had not been baptised.
6.
Muriel Box landed a job as continuity clerk on Anthony Asquith's Tell England.
7.
Muriel Box moved to British International Pictures at Elstree, where she worked on Alfred Hitchcock's Number Seventeen.
8.
Muriel Box occasionally assisted as a dialogue director, or re-shot scenes during post-production.
9.
Muriel Box often experienced prejudice in a male-dominated industry, especially hurtful when perpetrated by another woman.
10.
Muriel Box left film-making to write novels and created a successful publishing house, Femina, which proved to be a rewarding outlet for her feminism.
11.
Muriel Box published her memoirs, Odd Woman Out, in 1974, and published Rebel Advocate, a biography of her second husband, Gerald Gardiner, in 1983.
12.
Muriel Box married Sydney Box in 1935 and gave birth to a daughter, Leonora the following year.
13.
Muriel Box died in Mote End, Nan Clark's Lane, Mill Hill, Hendon, Barnet, London on 18 May 1991, aged 85.