Margaret Rawlings
Margaret Rawlings
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The above photograph was taken by Joan Hyde (nee Hudleston) when both
she and Margaret Rawlings were at Oxford High School. They were school friends
and Joan spoke fluent French but not Japanese. Margaret is posed in a library window.
The following are clippings from Joan's scrap book.
 Margaret Rawlings Off Stage On Thursday afternoon in the Light Programme Margaret Rawlings begins a new series of poetry readings. JOYCE EMERSON contributes this pen-portrait When Margaret Rawlings was playing in New York before the war, her future husband (she is married to Sir Robert Barlow,the Industrialist) used to ring her at her hotel. On occasions when she happened to be out, the operator would report to him with the American telephonist's customary formula: 'Miss Rawlings doesn't answer,' and this expression, applied to his fiancée, always struck him as splendidly ironic. For, as all her friends are well aware, if there was one thing that you could rely upon it was that Margaret Rawlings always answered: she was never at a loss for a reply and no topic was discussed upon which she did not have strong and independent views. Since intelligent opinions are not automatically expected from beautiful young actresses, Miss Rawlings frequently came as a shock to people who unsuspectingly invited her to parties and functions for her decorative value, and then found themselves getting the worst of a spirited discussion. Possibly her cosmopolitan start in life gave her assurance and an unusually wide range of interests. Her childhood was spent in Japan, where her father was a missionary, and where she attended a French convent to learn French. When at fourteen, she was sent to school in England, her French and Japanese were fluent and colloquial, but her conception of the British schoolgirls way of life was purely fanciful. Despite this handicap she left school with a State Scholarship to Oxford. She remained at Lady Margaret Hall for only one yea, however, since she had, in the meanwhile, decided to become an actress without delay. At the time of her debut on the stage, it was a theatrical tradition that sympathetic women characters were always fragile blondes with light, tinkling voices. Miss Rawlings who has black hair and stylish, but not fragile, good looks, found that she was typed as a vamp. Moreover her mellow contralto seemed not to be an asset. At an audition for the Birmingham Repertory Company, H.K. Ayliff, the producer, got up after hearing her and stalked away, commenting with majestic disapproval: 'Too gruff, too gruff, too gruff ...' Fortunately for Margaret Rawlings, fashions in heroines were to change in the space of a few years. Those who remember her in her early roles - as Katie O'Shea in Parnell, for instance - regret that she has been seen so infrequently on the London stage during the past twelve years. The explanation is, she says, that, having a husband and small daughter (just 12 years old), she likes to see them every evening and not just on Sundays. Thus, it has been for her broadcast readings of poetry that she has become best known in recent years. She acquired from her mother the habit of speaking poetry naturally, and as a child used to think it quite normal to recite a few lines for pure pleasure in her bath or putting on her galoshes, or indeed, in any circumstance when the spirit moved her. Now she never goes anywhere without the travelling bookcase which contains her favourite volumes, and reads scarcely anything but poetry.
The new series of poetry readings entitled From My Own Collection succeeds
the Hearts ease programmes listeners were accustomed to hear on Sunday nights.
Many poems in this new series are requests left over from the previous one
which ended at Easter, and Miss Rawlings will also be reading a poem by
William James Fry, an unknown poet who died recently and whose unpublished
works were sent to her by his sister.
Margaret Rawlings spent most of her career on the British stage and she made her feature-film debut in The Way of Lost Souls (1929). Her subsequent film appearances include:
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