Life and Career
Born in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, she was brought up on a farm near Banbury.
She began her stage career at the Old Vic in 1926 and later appeared with touring companies. She appeared in many British films before going to Hollywood. She made her first screen appearance in City of Song. She later had a leading role in Night in Montmartre (1931), and followed this success with The Hound of the Baskervilles (1932). Over the next few years, she played strong roles in such films as The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), The Three Musketeers (1935), The Informer (1935) and The Last of the Mohicans (1936). In 1937 she made the first of five appearances as Phyllis Clavering in the popular Bulldog Drummond series. She was cast as Kitty Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (1940) and as the maid, Ethel, in Suspicion (1941). Angel was also the leading lady in the first screen version of Raymond Chandler's The High Window, released in 1942 as Time to Kill. She was one of the passengers of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). Her film appearances in the following years were few, but she returned to Hollywood to provide voices for the Walt Disney animated films Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953).
She also played a continuing role in the television soap opera Peyton Place from 1964 until 1965. After that role, she played Miss Faversham, a nanny and a female friend of Sebastian Cabot's character of Giles French in the situation comedy Family Affair.
Angel was married to Robert B. Sinclair, a television director. On 4 January 1970, an intruder broke into their home; when Sinclair attempted to protect Angel, the intruder killed Sinclair in Angel's presence, then fled. The incident is believed to have been a failed burglary.
She died from cancer in Santa Barbara, California, and currently has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for her contributions to films, at 6312 Hollywood Boulevard. She was buried in Santa Barbara Cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Heather Angel (actress)
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)