The star of British cinema of the 30s, Nova Margery Pilbeam, was born on November 15, 1919 in the London district of Wimbledon, in the family of theater manager and actor Arnold Pilbeam. For the first time performing at the age of five at a charity performance led by her father, at the age of 12 she already received her first professional engagement, making her debut on the stage of the Savoy Theatre in the Christmas play "The Quack from Quack Hall" based on a children's fairy tale by Kenneth Graham.
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The star of British cinema of the 30s, Nova Margery Pilbeam, was born on November 15, 1919 in the London district of Wimbledon, in the family of theater manager and actor Arnold Pilbeam. For the first time performing at the age of five at a charity performance led by her father, at the age of 12 she already received her first professional engagement, making her debut on the stage of the Savoy Theatre in the Christmas play "The Quack from Quack Hall" based on a children's fairy tale by Kenneth Graham. Two years later, she landed a role in director Berthold Wirtel's Little Friend (1934), which overnight turned a hitherto unknown teenage girl into a movie star. In the same year, Pilbeam starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) as a victim of kitneping and signed a seven-year contract with Gaumont British. After the conclusion of the contract, she appeared in the historical drama directed by Robert Stevenson, The Tudor Rose (1936), where she played one of her best roles - the young lady Jane Grey, the ill-fated heiress of King Henry VIII, who reigned on the English throne for only nine days and was executed at the behest of Mary Tudor. Soon the actress again received an invitation from Alfred Hitchcock: released in 1937, the film “Young and Innocent”, in which she played in a pair with actor Derrick De Marney became her first adult work, which was appreciated by both critics and audiences. In 1939, Pilbeam married Penrose director Penn Tennyson, whom she met on the set of Hitchcock. Having achieved success in cinema, she nevertheless did not leave the stage and continued to play in the theater. Unfortunately, her career, which began so promising, gradually began to decline - the film studios with which Pilbeam worked after the collapse of Gaumon British, often offered her roles that did not correspond to the level of her acting talent, and successful works, such as the anti-fascist film Pastor Hall (1940, dir. Roy Bowling), went almost unnoticed. In the summer of 1941, the actress suffered a misfortune - during filming in Scotland, her husband Pen Tennyson died in a plane crash. Despite this, she found the strength to return to the audience in a short time, starring in several military films, which, however, contributed little to her popularity. From 1942 until the end of the war, she left the cinema for a while, focusing on working in the theater. She reappeared on the screen only in 1946 in the comedy "This is My Man" (Director Marcel Varnell), but her return was short-lived - having played several more roles in minor films, Nova Pilbeam finally left the cinema, devoting herself to the family.