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Margaret Rutherford: Miss Marple
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Margaret Rutherford became one of the best-loved eccentric character actresses in the post-war cinema. While her ample frame lacked the conventional appearance of the female star, her performances never lacked sparkle, though her gung-ho ebullience was often laced with something quite touching. Some of her finest parts came from theatre - she had already played Madame Arcati and Miss Prism on the stage before she repeated the roles in the screen adaptations of Blithe Spirit (1945) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952).
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Margaret Rutherford is wrong for the part of Miss Marple based on physical appearance alone. Agatha's Marple is described in various places as tall, straight and slim; Miss Rutherford is of medium height, is somewhat stooped and has a face like lumpy, unrisen bread dough. Her lower jaw juts like a bulldog's and her voice is a megaphone bullying its way through every scene. She does not fade quietly into the background at any point during Murder Ahoy (the DVD ... has trailers of all the other Rutherford-Marple movies, so I was able to get a fair taste of her performances in those films as well).
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Rutherford was raised by two aunts who encouraged her interest in the theatre. After teaching piano for five years and elocution for three, she entered the Old Vic School in London to study theatre (1925). Appearing frequently on the London stage from the early 1930s, she received critical notice for her role in Henrik Ibsen's Master Builder (1934). Her first great success was as the unconventional Miss Bijou Furse in Spring Meeting (1938). In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1939), she played Miss Prism, a part she repeated on the screen in 1952; and in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit (1941), she played the bicycling medium in both the stage and the motion-picture version (1945).
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Murder Most Foul represented Margaret Rutherford's third appearance as Agatha Christie's spinsterish sleuth Miss Marple. The film opens with Marple serving on a murder-trial jury. She forces a mistrial because she considers the accused to be innocent; to prove her theory, she traces the trail of evidence to a down-at-the-heels repertory company run by Ron Moody. She auditions for the troupe with a stirring rendition of "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," securing the job by flashing a roll of bills in front of the covetous Moody. While snooping about backstage, Miss Marple discovers both murderer and motive-and, as is customary in the "Marple" films, she nearly loses her own life in the process. Based on the Agatha Christie novel Mrs. McGinty's Dead, Murder Most Foul co-stars Margaret Rutherford's real-life husband Stringer Davis as Marple's friend and confidante Mr. Stringer.
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[O]f the Margaret Rutherford-Miss Marple movies is an adaptation of Agatha Christieís After the Funeral, with Marple investigating the demise of a man scared to death by a pussycat. Suspicious, huh?
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The first film version of the novel was MGM’s British-made "Murder, She Said," first in a series of four Miss Marple films starring British comic actress Margaret Rutherford. In that 1961 film, Christie's original concept went into the rubbish bin. There is no Lucy because Miss Marple (Margaret Rutherford) does all the detective work herself, getting the maid job on her own so she can skulk around the estate and conduct her own search for the body and clues to the murderer. There is ... no Elspeth McGillicuddy because Marple herself sees the strangulation as the other train zooms by.
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Miss Marple