Googie Withers, CBE (born 12 March 1917) is a British actress.
Born Georgette Lizette Withers she began acting at the age of 12. A student at the Italia Conti Academy stage school, 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.
Throughout her career she has appeared frequently in film, television, and theatre. During the 1970s, Withers appeared as prison governor Faye Boswell in the television series Within These Walls.
She has been married twice: initially to John Findlay and secondly to the Australian actor John McCallum since 1948, celebrating their Diamond Wedding on 24 January 2008. The couple met on a film set in Britain, and returned to Australia where both worked frequently in television together and appeared in a number of stage productions, also appearing together in the UK in Somerset Maugham's The Circle at Chichester Festival Theatre. They are the parents of the actors Nicholas McCallum and Joanna McCallum.
Withers' 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 for "Outstanding Performance By A Cast".
Withers was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002. That same year, aged 85, she appeared with Vanessa Redgrave in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan in London's West End.
In 2004, Googie Withers came back into the news when a character in the ITV soap Coronation Street, Norris Cole, quipped that "Googie Withers would be turning in her grave." Granada Television were forced to apologize a week later when it was discovered that she was very much alive.
Filmography
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