Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Miss Marple's final case: real-life crime mystery of late Oscar-winning actor

Alan Travis The Guardian,
Tuesday September 30 2008

She was an Academy Award-winning character actor best known in later life for her flamboyant screen portrayal of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.


But after her death, Dame Margaret Rutherford became the victim of a crime mystery worthy of the spinster detective herself.


The case involved Rutherford's live-in companion, the disappearance of an Oscar, and a Fulham antiques dealer.


Rutherford, who played Miss Marple in four films between 1961 and 1964, appearing alongside her real-life husband, Stringer Davis, employed a down on her luck former soprano as a companion in her declining years.


Violet Lang-Davis lived at the couple's home in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, before Rutherford died in 1972. Lang-Davis, then in her 60s, stayed on to look after Rutherford's widower and grew so close to him that they contemplated marriage. But he died in August 1973 before they could tie the knot.


He left a will which bequeathed everything to his wife, even though she was dead. All the silver, china and furniture the grande dame of the English stage and screen had accumulated in her career was due to pass to Stringer Davis's distant cousin William James Davis. Lang-Davis was left nothing.


As Detective Sergeant Paul Hunter of the Gerrards Cross police told the director of public prosecutions: "She then embarked on a series of actions designed to secure the inheritance of the late Mr Davis," according to a Whitehall file released this month at the National Archives.
She went to see her old priest in Brook Green, west London, Father Joseph Williams, who had agreed to marry her and Davis. She left a copy of a will naming herself as sole beneficiary while Williams was out visiting parishioners. An accompanying note asked him to act as an executor and to forward it to the Rutherford family solicitors.

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