Career
Pilbeam had widely noted roles as a child stage actress. This led to much work in her teen years, appearing in Alfred Hitchcock's film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), followed by her lead performance as Lady Jane Grey in Tudor Rose (1935). In 1937 when she was seventeen Pilbeam had a starring role in Hitchcock's Young and Innocent, for which she is most widely known. Her film career may have stalled somewhat when she was considered for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), but lost the role to Margaret Lockwood.
In 1939 she appeared on an early British television drama. That year, David O. Selznick wanted Pilbeam for the lead in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and thought she could be an international film star. However, her agent was worried about the length of a five-year contract and meanwhile Hitchcock, whose outlook on the film was not the same as Selznick's, auditioned hundreds of others over many months, at last giving the role to Joan Fontaine. Unlike other widely known English film actors of the 1930s Pilbeam never made a film in Hollywood. She carried on with appearances in at least nine English films along with many stage roles throughout the 1940s. One of Pilbeam's last films was The Three Weird Sisters (1948), its post-war Gothic-drama screenplay credited to five writers, among them Dylan Thomas. By 1949, before the age of 30, she had left her acting career.
Read more about this topic: Nova Pilbeam
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