Margaret Rutherford
British actress (1892–1972)
Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford (11 May 1892 – 22 May 1972) was an English actress of stage, films and television.
Rutherford came to national attention following the Second World War in the film adaptations of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1948 she was awarded a Special Tony Award for Outstanding Foreign Company as a cast member of The Importance of Being Earnest, and she later won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture for her role as the Duchess of Brighton in The V.I.P.s (1963). In the early 1960s she starred as Agatha Christie's character Miss Marple in a series of four George Pollock films. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1961 and a Dame Commander (DBE) in 1967.
Early life and education
Rutherford's early life was overshadowed by tragedies involving both of her parents. Her father, journalist and poet William Rutherford Benn, married Florence Nicholson on 16 December 1882 in Wandsworth, South London. One month after the marriage he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum. Released to travel under his family's supervision, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational Church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamber pot, before cutting his own throat with a pocket knife at an inn in Matlock, Derbyshire, on 4 March 1883.
Following the inquest, William Benn was certified insane and removed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Margaret Rutherford” is british actress (1892–1972). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Margaret, Rutherford and British, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q230143. VIAF identifies the subject as 14972546. The Library of Congress control number is n83049932. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892, 1972, 1948 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Margaret Rutherford” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.