Saturdays with the Stars: Madeleine Carroll

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  While Hitchcock started making feature-length movies as early as 1925 (and indeed his first film starred a woman, Virginia Valli, who was a leading woman of the Silent Era), we're going to enter his career a decade later, during his early sound films with an actress who actually headlined two of Hitchcock's pictures, including possibly his earliest "classic," or at least one of the earliest films oftentimes name-checked with Hitchcock.  This month, our star is Madeleine Carroll.

Carroll grew up near Birmingham, England, the daughter of an Irishman and a French woman.  Her early career didn't scream "actress," in the same way that other stars of her era did (she went to university and was at one point a teacher), but she eventually started doing stage work, and many would comment on her icy beauty.  She appeared in a number of British productions (including the scandalous Young Woodley, about a student who has an affair with his headmaster's wife), and then headed to Hollywood, where she quickly made a name for herself, starring in the John Ford film The World Moves On.

Carroll would appear in two Hitchcock films, The 39 Steps and Secret Agent, both with Robert Donat as her leading man.  Though Carroll would enjoy a long life, she didn't grant a lot of interviews so there's not much in terms of contemporary accounts of what she thought of the director.  The films cemented her fame though-she'd go on to be a contract star of the late 1930's until the early 1940's, when a personal tragedy (her sister died in the London bombings during World War II), got her more involved in the war effort, and her film career waned.  She also had an extraordinary personal life (which we'll discuss throughout the month) including several well-documented marriages to public men.  This month, we'll take a peak at Madeleine Carroll on-and-off the screen, and in particular the two films with Hitchcock that cemented her legacy.