Googie Withers is worth seeking out for the intelligence and sensuality she brings to complicated women. Her substantial dramatic roles offer a fuller introduction than the supporting appearances in The Lady Vanishes and Shine.
Fi1m perspective
Googie Withers is most persuasive playing women who are frustrated without being helpless. Her Rose Sandigate in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a trapped housewife, but there is more to the performance than suffering. Withers gives her resilience and passion, qualities that make her circumstances harder to bear. We rate her for making such women worth understanding without tidying away their faults or asking us to approve of everything about them.
The Lady Vanishes (1938) finds her in the supporting role of Blanche, before the substantial dramatic opportunities of the 1940s. Alfred Hitchcock's railway mystery is tense, funny and sharp about the excuses people make for ignoring trouble. Margaret Lockwood supplies the urgency, even when the plotting becomes fussy. Withers's appearance belongs to an early period largely spent in minor parts, comedies and quota quickies. We recommend the film warmly, with the proviso that it is a limited introduction to her.
The change is clearer in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), which casts her as Dutch resistance figure Jo de Vries in one of her first major dramatic roles. Her work with directors Robert Hamer and Michael Powell, and her association with Ealing melodramas, deserve attention beyond those early supporting appearances. We would also make room for On Approval (1944): her ability to hold her own in ensemble comedy is worth remembering when the troubled women threaten to become the whole account of her work.
Shine (1996) gives us a much later supporting appearance, as Katharine Susannah Prichard, under Scott Hicks's direction. We were moved by the parental pressure on David Helfgott, whom Geoffrey Rush and Noah Taylor make worth caring about. The storytelling takes shortcuts, but the performances earn its warmth, though Withers is not the centre of our response to it. That is no reason to overlook the appearance, but it is a reason not to let it stand for a career that included substantial dramatic roles and high comedy. For a fuller introduction to Withers herself, start with It Always Rains on Sunday.
Biography
Googie Withers was an English actress and dancer. Born Georgette Lizette Withers in Karachi, British India, in 1917, she trained at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts and made her stage debut at the age of twelve. She appeared in more than sixty films, beginning with The Girl in the Crowd (1934).
Withers became a prominent figure in British cinema during and after the Second World War. Her notable roles include Blanche in The Lady Vanishes (1938), Jo de Vries in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), Joan Cortland in Dead of Night (1945), Rose Sandigate in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Helen Nosseross in Night and the City (1950). She married actor John McCallum in 1948 and later settled in Australia, where they worked extensively in theatre. Her final screen role was as Katharine Susannah Prichard in Shine (1996). She received the CBE and AO.
