The more obvious comparison may seem to be between Calvert and Gainsborough colleague Margaret Lockwood. I choose Withers here because the roles she played were earthed in a reality that highwaywoman Lockwood never, in my perception, aspired to. Lockwood could flare her nostrils and narrow her eyes, bare her cleavage and secure the deaths of hapless others, and be altogether a bad lot, but to me she always seemed like a nice girl in fancy-dress as she held up coaches and poisoned husbands. However, I am aware that a considerable body of scholarship would take issue with me here (Harper 1994; Babington 2001), and that Lockwood was an enormous favourite in 1940s British cinema. Withers, though, whether playing a sluttish pub landlady or a prosaically married woman yearning for her criminal lover, or a determined lady farmer, always imbued her roles with a powerful sense of their actuality, of their place in the circumambient world. So in her gentler way did Calvert. Both, via divergent screen personas, seemed related to the changing social realities of the period, the period of highest achievement in British cinema. Roughly put, I see Calvert’s image as dominant until war’s end when it is displaced by the bolder Withers women. It is not that there weren’t other notable women contributing to this fertile period – think of Sally Gray, Valerie Hobson, Jean Kent, the sublime Celia Johnson – but it is at least arguable that no two actresses between them say so much about what was expected of and available to women in 1940s Britain and British cinema. Undeniably, Calvert was given less rewarding material to work on than

Withers was. Years later, Calvert recalled how she hated being typecast as

goody-goodies, but the on-screen evidence indicates how intelligently she played them. She stays in the mind for her no-nonsense avoidance of sentimentality as she represents a ‘wholesome’ image of 1940s wife and mother. She represents a femininity no doubt held desirable in wartime when so many women were for the first time encouraged to break away from domestic confines – and then, post-war, encouraged to go right back to them. Withers, in her magnificently brazen sensuality, was clearly never going to be party to such patriarchal manipulation; Calvert, for all her English-rose sweetness, commands respect for her characters, insisting on their individuality despite the daunting stereotypes they may have seemed on paper.