Anna Lee — The Beautiful British (1943) 🇺🇸

February 21, 2023

Unique is the word for Annie. She is blonde, blue-eyed, fragile of appearance and far lovelier than is necessary, even in glamour gummed-up Hollywood. You saw her first with Ronald Colman in RKO's "My Life With Caroline," which depicted her with no more brain than you could carry on the tip of a knife while riding a jeep at full speed. This was a gross libel, because the Lee lady is definitely on the cerebral side.

by Fredda Dudley

Her second picture was "How Green Was My Valley," in which she played Roddy McDowall's beloved Bron. After that came Flying Tigers in nurse's white, then "Flesh And Fantasy" and "The Commandos Strike At Dawn." But wait till you see her performance in "Hangmen Also Die!"

Now that you have the key to her identity, would you like the key to her life? It's the masculine department of the human race. Proof of this exciting statement will follow immediately.

Miss Lee (then known as Joanna Boniface Winnifreth) at the malleable age of ten was the only distaff member of a boys' school. It came about in this way: Her father was the rector at Ightham, near Sevenoaks, Kent. England, and he was also headmaster of the preparatory school. As there were no feminine educational opportunities located near by, Joanna was taught her lessons with the boys. Also, her hair was cropped exactly as theirs was and she wore the same school toggery.

She played all the games — even to the English version of football — until one of the more embittered spinsters in her father's pastorate protested that this was shocking behavior for a little girl, particularly a parson's daughter. Miss Lee remembers to this day, with quiet wrath, her anguish at being kicked off the first team.

And, as it must befall each of us, Miss Lee's first daring adventure was inspired by a man. He was a gorgeous creature — a lion tamer in a circus. "As I recall him, he must have been a most frightful ham, posturing and grimacing and flexing his muscles," Miss Lee said reminiscently. "But I thought him all romance and alluring masculinity."

When the circus moved away Miss Lee followed her hero and volunteered to become a permanent member of the circus staff. Her description of her ability as an elephant-feeder, apprentice bareback rider and general handy man was so eloquent that she was about to be employed when her father appeared on the scene, garbed in the drapes of wrath.

However, being the child of enlightened parents, Joanna was given a chance to explain her outrageous conduct before punishment was meted out. She said that she wanted to be an actress. That it wasn't primarily the charm of the lion tamer that had lured her away, but impersonal admiration for his art. A family council finally handed down a decision: When Miss Lee had passed her senior Oxford examinations, she might decide for herself whether she wanted further education along the lines of the liberal arts, or whether she wanted to study mathematics.

Those interested in numerology might find something significant in the fact that, at her fourteenth year, Miss Lee's life altered drastically. Her father died, so she and her mother moved away from the vicarage and Anna was placed in a girls' school. She still considers this one of her most terrifying experiences to date. She was one hundred per cent nonconformist; she couldn't get used to feminine clothes, and she had to stand a good deal of ribbing about her cropped hair.

She was thoroughly miserable. To this day, she is slightly chary of women. She likes them; she thinks they are too, too clever to wear those odd hats and those quaint, back-breaking shoes. But for exciting conversation that she really understands, give her a pipe-smoking stag session.

There was one small triumph in this grey year. She heard about a nearby rifle match, and entered. She was the youngest entrant by many years, and the only female. You guessed it. She still has the trophy.

And, at the end of the year, she passed her senior Oxford exams with honors and thus won the right to enter the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Arts in London. After a year of study, she secured a job as understudy with a theatrical company. Her job was to appear occasionally as a male corpse. Quiet and restful work, of course, but lacking a future.

At approximately this time, the recurrent male theme again repeated itself in the Lee life. She had a sweetheart stationed in Hong Kong and she heard of an elderly woman who was planning a trip to India and wanted a vigorous, intelligent young companion. Miss Lee immediately cornered the job. They spent some time in Tokyo ("I was horrified at sight of the place of women in Oriental society") and an even longer period in Hong Kong. Incidentally, they were in China long enough for Miss Lee to transfer her affection from the gentleman whom she came originally to visit to another colorful chap in the Service of the King. Then they moved on to Ceylon, Singapore, thence to Bombay, Agra and Delhi. ("I want to go back to India someday. It is fabulous, fascinating and beautiful.")

Upon returning to London, Anna did some modeling. For years she was celebrated as the possessor of the most photogenic hands and feet in England. There is, in an Edinburgh gallery at present, a portrait of Miss Lee, barefooted.

From modeling, she took the logical step to bit parts in pictures, working with a girl named Estelle O'Brien. At that time, and to this day, Anna insists that this certain Miss O'Brien is one of the great beauties of our day, a girl with smouldering dark eyes, a high, childishly rounded forehead, a bee-stung mouth, and great wings of sleek, black hair. Miss O'Brien has done okay in American pictures under the name of Merle Oberon, now Lady Korda.

From bits, Miss Lee progressed rapidly to small parts, then to leads. But do not make the mistake of thinking that the boys' school motif had disappeared from her symphony of fate. Anna was cast as the only feminine character in a picture to be filmed in the North African desert. The remainder of the cast, you ask? Forty-two good men and true.

After a few weeks of desert heat, wind and sand, these forty-two gentlemen were about as friendly as parboiled cobras, so Miss Lee spent a good deal of her free time strolling about the desert with a rifle cuddled under one arm. While she was walking through the "cool" of the evening (the thermometer had done a dizzy dive down to 100 degrees) she was approached by a newcomer immaculate in white helmet, white shirt, white shorts, white sox and white-and-tan sport shoes. Additional dividends included his handsome face and physique, his cheerful grin and his cultured English accent. Considering current grime, beards, perspiration and tempers, this apparition resembled something out of the 'Arabian Nights."

It developed, after a moment's conversation, that he had been flown down from England to check up on the progress of the film. His name was Robert Stevenson and in practically no time he had decided that Anna Lee's social title should be the same with a Mrs. prefix. They were married December 7, 1934.

Joanna Venetia Invicta Stevenson was born in March, 1938, and shortly afterward the three Stevensons came to America pursuant to an offer from D. O. Selznick, who wanted to sign Mr. Stevenson as a director.

While Mr. Stevenson was working at RKO, Lewis Milestone — a fellow director at the same studio — was frantically seeking a leading lady to play opposite Ronald Colman in "My Life With Caroline." He had some English films run off and spotted "just the type" in a playful picture called "A Young Man's Fancy."

Mr. Milestone struck up a hot cable correspondence with London studios trying to locate this dream girl and finally received the information that the lady could be reached through Mr. Stevenson.

The story goes that Mr. Milestone went charging out to the Stevenson set, his hair awry, his complexion gleaming. "Look, Bob," he demanded breathlessly, "I'm having a terrific time trying to locate a girl named Anna Lee. Finally got a London report that you can set me on her trail. Have any idea where I can get in touch with her?"

Stevenson nodded toward a near-by chair. "Anna Lee is Mrs. Stevenson and she's seated over there," he replied with an Englishman's unshakable calm.

All of which explains why lucky American audiences are learning that "Lee" stands for Anna as well as Robert E.

By the way, the Stevensons are now four. Caroline Lydia Boniface Clementina was born January 24, 1942. There is an early suggestion that she may resemble her mother and follow the Lee tradition, because of the garment she has chosen as her all-time favorite. It is a small boy's cap which she appropriated after it had been forgotten by a pint-sized gentleman guest.

L. B. C. Stevenson will undoubtedly want to go to Harvard.

The End