Anna Lee

The daughter of a clergyman, Anna Lee was born Joan Boniface Winnifrith and encouraged to pursue an acting career by her father. After training at London's Royal Albert Hall, she took to the boards and later began appearing in English films, first as an extra, then working her way up to featured parts and finally earning the unofficial title "Queen of the Quota Quickies. " Lee and her husband, director Robert Stevenson, relocated to Hollywood in the late 1930s, and Lee began starring in stateside productions as well as becoming a fixture of the John Ford stock company (she appeared in How Green Was My Valley (1941), Fort Apache (1948) and a half-dozen others).

Anna Lee played opposite a character named Allan Quartermain, in King Solomon's Mines (1937), then 46 years later played a character named Lila Quartermaine in TV soap General Hospital (1963) who had a son Alan Quartermaine.

The blue-eyed blonde was occasionally a brunette in films. In Seven Sinners (1940), she wore her hair darker because star Marlene Dietrich insisted on no competing blondes in her pictures.

Appeared in two Oscar Best Picture winners How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Sound of Music (1965), and one further nominee: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).

Had two daughters with first husband Robert Stevenson. Following their divorce in 1944, Anna was given custody of younger daughter Caroline, but Venetia chose to live with her father. Anna was estranged from her daughter for 15 years. They reunited after appearing together in the films Jet Over the Atlantic (1959) and The Big Night (1960).

In the film Bedlam (1946), Anna darkened her hair so that audiences would take her more seriously and kept it dark for much of the next few years. One of her costumes was worn by Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939).

She did no work in the cinema between 1949 and 1958, because, she claimed, she had been blacklisted by the far-right supporters of Senator McCarthy. She found this ridiculous, especially as she was, in her own words, "an old-fashioned Winston Churchill conservative", and always gave her old friend John Ford the credit for breaking the blacklist.

Dubbed the voice of Patricia Morison who was playing the writer George Sand in the movie Song Without End (1960) because George Cukor, who did uncredited directing on the film after Charles Vidor's death, wanted the character to have harsher vocal tones.

Amber Tamblyn originally portrayed the adopted granddaughter of Lee's character on General Hospital (1963). In the 1950s (long before Tamblyn's birth), Tamblyn's father, Russ Tamblyn, was married to Lee's daughter Venetia Stevenson.

In 1970, she became the seventh wife of novelist, poet and playwright Robert Nathan (Portrait of Jennie (1948), The Bishop's Wife (1947)); they married three months after they met.

She was appointed M.B.E. (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1982 for services to drama.

Had three sons from her second marriage: John, Steven and Timothy. John passed away in 1986.

From 1990 to 1991, Ms. Lee's granddaughter, Erin Everly, was married to Axl Rose, of Guns N' Roses, briefly making Axl Rose Ms. Lee's "grandson-in-law." Ms. Everly was the inspiration for the Guns N' Roses song "Sweet Child O' Mine" and is the daughter of Ms. Lee's daughter Venetia Stevenson and Don Everly of The Everly Brothers.

She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 1993 for her services to film and television industry.

Anna Lee passed away on May 14, 2004. Just a couple of months afterwards, General Hospital (1963) aired a tribute to Lee by holding a memorial service for her character.