Dulcie Gray (1915–2011)

Dulcie Gray, née Bailey, was born in Kuala Lumpur in British Malaya (present-day Malaysia). She was educated at schools in Wallingford, Wokingham, and Swanage, and then returned to Malaya to work as a teacher and journalist. After her father's death in 1937, she came back to the UK permanently. Following a brief period at art school, she enrolled at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. There she met Michael Denison, whom she married in 1939. She took the professional surname Gray from her mother. The couple's acting careers were intertwined and they frequently appeared on stage and in films together. Their partnership was still going strong into the 1990s with the New York City revival of An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, in which they made their Broadway debuts together in 1996. Gray had by then become a familiar face on BBC Television in the drama series Howards' Way (1985 to 1990). She was also a playwright and a prolific author of crime novels. She wrote more than two dozen successful murder mysteries, many of them set in the theater world. They included 17 detective stories featuring Inspector Cardiff, eight radio plays, and several volumes of short stories — including the horror short story, "The Fur Brooch," which was adapted into an episode of the popular NBC-TV series Night Gallery. Under her real name and the pseudonym Alex White, she wrote a number of short horror stories for the Pan Horror series. With her husband, she wrote about the craft of acting for young children in An Actor and His World (1964). She also wrote Butterflies on My Mind (1978), a nonfiction work on the conservation and life of butterflies in Great Britain, illustrated by Brian Hargreaves, which won a prize from the Times of London. Her autobiography, Looking Forward, Looking Back, was published in 1992. She and Denison were both appointed CBE in 1983.