Barbara Mullen

At the age of 24, she wrote her autobiography, Life is my Adventure. A year later she made her London debut, acting the title role in the London West End production of Jeannie, a comedy about a Scottish girl taking a European holiday after coming into money. She became an overnight star.

She later succeeded Celia Johnson as Mrs De Winter in the Daphne Du Maurier classic Rebecca and played Maggie in a revival of What Every Woman Knows by J M Barrie and as the aged sleuth Miss Marple in The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie.

Mullen repeated the role of 'Jeannie' on television and in the 1941 British film, which was her cinema debut, alongside Michael Redgrave, and she followed this with appearances in 20 further films, including A Place of One's Own, Corridor of Mirrors and Innocent Sinners. She also played a notable role in the 1942 film version of Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, as Ellen Kirby, the feminist who is jailed for her "subversive" ideas. She was the daughter of Pat Mullen, star of Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran. She was married to the film's cameraman, documentary film-maker John Taylor. and they had two daughters - Briged and Susannah.