Googie Withers

Googie Withers, CBE (born 12 March 1917) is an Indian-born British theatre, film and television actress who has long been a resident of Australia.

Born Georgette Lizette Withers in Karachi (then part of British India but now in Pakistan) to a British sailor and a Dutch mother, she was known as “Googie” from an early age. Her family returned to England when she was aged seven and she began acting at the age of twelve. A student at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, she was a dancer in a West End production when she was offered work as a film extra in Michael Powell’s The Girl in the Crowd (1935). She arrived on the set to find one of the major players in the production had been dismissed, and she was immediately asked to step into the role.

During the 1930s she was constantly in demand in lead roles in minor films and supporting roles in more prestigious productions. Her best known work of the period was as one of Margaret Lockwood’s friends in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938).

Among her successes of the 1940s was the Powell and Pressburger film One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), a topical World War II drama in which she played a resistance fighter who helps British airmen return to safety from behind enemy lines. She is well remembered for role as the devious Helen Nosseross in Night and the City (1950), a classic film noir.

While filming The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947), she met her co-star, the Australian actor John McCallum, and they were married on 24 January the following year. They remained married until McCallum’s death on 3 February 2010. She first toured Australia in the stage play Simon and Laura. When McCallum was offered the position running J.C. Williamson Theatres, they moved to Australia. Withers starred in a number of stage plays, including Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, Desire of the Moth, The First 400 Years (with Keith Michell), Beekman Place (for which she also designed the set), The Kingfisher, Stardust, and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Wilde’s An Ideal Husband for the Melbourne Theatre Company; both productions toured Australia. They appeared together in the U.K. in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the Chichester Festival Theatre. They are the parents of actress Joanna McCallum and art director Nicholas McCallum.

She starred on Broadway with Michael Redgrave in The Complaisant Lover and in London with Alec Guinness in Exit the King. During the 1970s, Withers appeared as prison governor Faye Boswell in the television series Within These Walls. (She was so well known from Within These Walls, that she had been asked to play the role of the Governor of Wentworth Detention Centre in Prisoner, a job which she declined.) In 1986, Withers starred in the BBC adaptation of Hotel du Lac, which was followed a year later by another BBC production of Northanger Abbey. In 1990, she appeared in ITV’s adaptation of “Ending Up”. Withers’s most recent screen performance was as the Australian novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard in the 1996 film Shine, for which she and the other cast members were nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for “Outstanding performance by a cast”.

Withers was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002. That same year, aged eighty-five, she appeared with Vanessa Redgrave in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan in London’s West End.

In 2004, Googie Withers came back into the news when a character on the ITV soap Coronation Street, Norris Cole, quipped that “Googie Withers would turn in her grave”. Granada Television was forced to apologize a week later when they realised that she was very much alive. —wikipedia