Anne Crawford

Imelda Anne Crawford was a British film actress born on 22 November 1920 in Palestine to a Scottish father and an English mother. She was raised in Edinburgh, and it was on the advice of actor Alastair Sim that she pursued formal training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Crawford built her screen career during the 1940s alongside contemporaries Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert, becoming particularly associated with women's pictures of that decade. Among her notable film appearances were Millions Like Us (1943), Two Thousand Women (1944), and They Were Sisters (1945).

Her work extended to the stage, including a Broadway appearance in 1951 in the play The Green Bay Tree. Crawford had originally come from Haifa, Israel, before establishing herself in the British entertainment industry.

In 1953 she married Wallace Douglas. Later in her career, after appearing in a stage production of The Gift — a play centered on a scientist blinded by an accident — Crawford added a codicil to her will donating her eyes to the International Eye Bank. At the time of her final illness, she had been performing in Agatha Christie's The Spider's Web at London's Savoy Theatre, a fact reported by The Times on 18 October 1956. Crawford died of leukemia in a London nursing home on 17 October 1956, at the age of 35.