Hillary Brooke | | The Guardian

Hillary Brooke

Although the tall, beautiful, blonde actress Hillary Brooke, who has died aged 84, did appear in a number of A-movies, and was seen a few times in Technicolor, she will always be associated with the small, monochrome second features that were the staple of picture-going in the 1940s and early 1950s. As such she retained the affection of the many collectors of cinema arcana.

Brooke's fame, such as it was, came mainly from her appearances in a couple of the pacy and atmospheric Sherlock Holmes films, starring the witty duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, and as comic foil to a less sophisticated pair, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, in their popular TV series.

In Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), Brooke, in her first leading role, played Sally Musgrave, an impoverished aristocrat in whose ancestral home a number of murders take place. Variety called her "a real looker", but the juvenile lead, Milburn Stone, said that during a romantic scene, he felt "almost like a midget" next to her.

Considered tall for the era at five feet six inches, Brooke, born Beatrice Peterson of Swedish ancestry in Long Island, excelled in sports in high school. After Columbia University (she was bright, too), she became a model with the huge Powers agency, posing primarily for mail order catalogues. She carried her experience as a model on to the screen, where she was almost invariably elegantly poised and classily-attired.

Before her film debut in New Faces Of 1937, a year in England gave her a passable English accent that served her well in the Sherlock Holmes films and as Blanche Ingram, the fiancée of Rochester (Orson Welles) in Jane Eyre (1944). She also developed the icy blonde British image, so beloved of Alfred Hitchcock, in her various roles as villains. In fact, she did work for Hitch at the end of her career, appearing as the enigmatic Jan Peterson in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

One of her most malevolent portrayals was in the title role of The Woman In Green (1945) in which, as head of a syndicate of blackmail and murder with Professor Moriarty, she hypnotises Sherlock Holmes. The previous year she played a Nazi agent, known as Mrs Bellane Number 2, part of Ray Milland's nightmarish situation in Fritz Lang's Ministry Of Fear. She was cruel in a different way in John Cromwell's The Enchanted Cottage (1945), as the society woman who rejects her fiancé Robert Young when he returns from the first world war horribly disfigured.

Brooke was also a spunky, no-nonsense gal in The Lone Wolf, Crime Doctor and Big Town, low-budget series. She refused to play dumb blondes. "Vacuity will never substitute for a glint of intelligence," she remarked. "However, anyone, man or woman, who is ostentatiously erudite, is lacking in something else or else is just a crashing bore."

Her brilliant comic timing was demonstrated in her roles opposite comedians such as Bob Hope in Monsieur Beaucaire (1946), Red Skelton in The Fuller Brush Man (1948), and Abbott and Costello in Africa Screams (1949) and Abbott And Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), in which she played the pirate Captain Bonney. This led to the Abbott And Costello Show on TV from 1952 to 1953, when Brooke managed to retain her dignity as Hillary, the girlfriend of the chubby, imbecilic Lou in a series of low-brow slapstick, terrible puns, and improbable situations.

Another TV series followed, My Little Margie, in which Brooke was delightful as a go-getting woman trying to land Charles Farrell, Gale Storm's widowed playboy father. The show ran from 1952 until 1955. In 1960, she married Ray Klune, vice-president of MGM (she was divorced from assistant director Jack Voglin) and retired from acting after appearing in Spoilers Of The Forest (1957).

Brooke, who is survived by a son, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, once said: "I never thought I was a great actress. Maybe I would have been better if I'd worked harder at it. But I really enjoyed my career and the wonderful people I worked with."

Hillary Brooke (Beatrice Peterson), actress; born September 8, 1914; died May 25, 1999.

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