Mary Law, who has died aged 91, twice played anxious boarding house owner Mollie Ralston in Agatha Christie’s long-running West End show The Mousetrap; it was also a favorite of 1950s television; She became the first British TV actress to go into space – as science student Janet Campbell in the children’s series The Lost Planet (1954) – and appeared briefly in the hospital soap opera Emergency Department 10. .
With her blue eyes, blonde hair and expressive face, Mary Law became the fifth actress to play Agatha Christie’s leading lady when she joined the cast of the Mousetrap movie in 1956. He was still in this role when the series reached its 1998 run. September 1957, making it the longest-running play in British theater history. It continues today, reaching almost 30,000 performances.
After leaving The Mousetrap in 1958, he returned a year later in a guest appearance when the play was performed at Wormwood Scrubs; Towards the end of the demonstration, two prisoners managed to escape. Mary Law also recalled with some concern how the captive audience members shouted during an onstage fight: “Kill him! Kill him!”
Her most memorable film appearance was in the 1960 comedy Carry on Constable, in which she played a store assistant who is suspicious of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey’s bumbling rookie cops disguised as women shoppers.
“I always remember Charlie Hawtrey coming to me to ask me how to wear very high heels and walk properly,” Hawtrey told nostalgia site Retroboy, adding that most scenes were shot in one take. “I had to spend a very tiring morning running [Hawtrey] and Kenneth Williams is somewhere in London.”
Mary Elisabeth Law was born in Croydon on 23 September 1932, the only child of architect Oliver Law and his wife Marjorie “Madge” (née Nutter), an amateur theater enthusiast. Mary’s wartime memories included streams of white vapor and black smoke from bombings or dogfights in the skies over the Sussex Downs where she went horseback riding.
As a child, she wanted to be a dancer until she was captivated by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He performed his first plays at schools in Worthing and West Chiltington, and after attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art made his stage debut in Shakespeare productions directed by Robert Atkins at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. “We had to compete with the roar of the lions at the zoo,” she recalled.
On television, she played a nurse in A Place of Execution (1953) and the Duchess of York in the Shakespeare adaptation An Age of Kings (1960), opposite Eileen Atkins, Sean Connery and Patrick Garland.
She was also seen opposite Peter Vaughan in the newspaper series Deadline Midnight (1960), which, like The Lost Planet, was originally broadcast live and in black and white. “We then went on to shoot and record in color,” he said. Her first film appearance was as an office girl in the romantic comedy For Better, for Worse (1954), opposite Dirk Bogarde.
Mary Law returned to the stage in 1955 as one of the three witches in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Macbeth with Laurence Olivier and in Dulcie Gray’s Love Affair at the Hammersmith Lyric Theatre. The following year, before joining The Mousetrap, she played neurotic wife Kay Strange in the slightly less successful murder-mystery film Towards Zero, based on Agatha Christie’s novel. She returned to the cast as Mollie Ralston from 1975 to 1976.
Currently in the West End, in the mid-1960s she played Lady (Emilia) Dilke to Anthony Quayle’s adulterous politician Sir Charles Dilke in The Right Honorable Gentleman, alongside Anna Massey, Corin Redgrave and Coral Browne. At other times he was in weekly repertoire around the country, rehearsing one show during the day and performing another in the evening.
In recent years Mary Law has become a passionate environmentalist and has campaigned against proposals for fracking near her home in West Sussex. In her eighties, she was volunteering at an animal shelter founded by neighbors Patrick Garland and his actress wife, Alexandra Bastedo.
In 1960, she married orchestra and theater conductor Kenneth Alwyn in a ceremony held in the rain at St Paul’s, the actors’ church in Covent Garden. They worked together on occasion and presented a 1979 Radio 2 series called That’s Entertainment, with guests including Tommy Steele, Marti Caine and Max Jaffa.
She also told the story of the Second World War on her husband’s 1990 Battle of Britain concert tour of North America, featuring wartime classics with the BBC Concert Orchestra and RAF Central Band.
Alwyn died in 2020 and Mary Law is survived by their daughter Timandra, who is a child actress. Their other daughter, Lucy, died of a brain tumor last year.
Mary Law was born on September 23, 1932, died on April 15, 2024.