The remarkable Margaret Rutherford was actually a member of the Benn family, but her father’s name was changed after a real life grisly murder and a later suicide, the likes of which her Miss Marple character would investigate in several adaptations inspired by Agatha Christie’s books.

Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford, DBE (11 May 1892 – 22 May 1972) was an English actress of stage, television and film. She came to prominence following World War II in the film adaptations of Noël Coward‘s Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde‘s The Importance of Being Earnest. She won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for her role as the Duchess of Brighton in The V.I.P.s (1963). She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1961 and a Dame Commander (DBE) in 1967.

Margaret Rutherford’s early life was overshadowed by tragedies involving both of her parents. Her father, journalist and poet William Rutherford Benn, married Florence Nicholson on 16 December 1882 in Wandsworth, south London. One month after the marriage, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum. Released to travel under his family’s supervision, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational Church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamber pot, before slashing his own throat with a pocket knife at an inn in Matlock, Derbyshire on 4 March 1883.

Following the inquest, William Benn was certified insane and removed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Seven years later, on 26 July 1890, he was discharged from Broadmoor and reunited with his wife. He legally dropped his surname.

Margaret Taylor Rutherford, the only child of William and Florence, was born in 1892 in Balham, South London. Margaret’s uncle, Sir John Benn, 1st Baronet, was a politician, as was her first cousin, William Wedgewood Benn, 1st Viscount Stansgate, the father of Labour politician Tony Benn and grandfather of Hilary Benn MP. Hoping to start a new life far from the scene of their recent troubles, the Rutherfords emigrated to Madras, India, but Margaret was returned to Britain when she was three years old to live with her aunt Bessie Nicholson in Wimbledon, south London, after her pregnant mother hanged herself from a tree.

Young Margaret had been told that her father died of a broken heart soon afterwards, so when she was 12 years old she was shocked to learn that her father had actually been readmitted to Broadmoor Hospital in 1903, where he remained under care until his death on 4 August 1921. Her parents’ mental afflictions gave rise to a fear that she might succumb to similar maladies, a fear which haunted her for the rest of her life, and she suffered intermittent bouts of depression and anxiety.

In 1945, Rutherford, then aged fifty-three, married character actor Stringer Davis, forty-six, after a courtship that lasted for 15 years.

In the early 1960s, Margaret Rutherford appeared as Miss Jane Marple along with her husband Stringer Davis, in a series of four George Pollock films loosely based on the novels of Agatha Christie: Murder, She Said, Murder at the Gallop, Murder Most Foul and Murder Ahoy! all with Rutherford starring as Miss Marple. The films depicted Marple as a colourful character, respectable but bossy and eccentric. The actress, then aged in her 70s, insisted on wearing her own clothes for the part and having her husband appear alongside her. Rutherford reprised the role of Miss Marple in a very brief, uncredited cameo in the 1965 film The Alphabet Murders.

Although Margaret Rutherford’s portrayal of Miss Marple was not quite as Dame Agatha Christie had described her, Christie was impressed enough to dedicate her 1963 novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side “To Margaret Rutherford in admiration“.