Mary Louise Coulouris

MARY LOUISE Coulouris, who has died aged 72, was an acclaimed painter, printmaker, muralist and public artist whose works appear in galleries and museums, railway stations, hospitals and private collections in the UK and beyond.

Although born in New York City and raised in Hollywood, the daughter of English movie star George Coulouris would fall in love with a Glaswegian, Gordon Wallace, and spend half her life in Scotland.

From 1976, at her home studio at Strawberry Bank, Linlithgow, she created works for one-woman and group shows at the Glasgow Art Centre, the Scottish Gallery, the Scottish Arts Club on Edinburgh's Rutland Square and the city's Kingfisher gallery. She also had studio space at WASPS Dalry, Edinburgh, and at Edinburgh Printmakers on Union Street. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.

She had 20 solo exhibitions in Britain, France, Greece and the US and contributed to the Edinburgh-based Art in Healthcare charity, which helps hospitals, care homes, surgeries and other medical centres obtain art work to brighten patients' lives. Among her best-known public murals is the one – painted in 1985 and refurbished in 1993 – which lights up the waiting room at Linlithgow railway station.

The Scottish Poetry Library in Glasgow houses three specially commissioned carpets designed by her and a series of her watercolours adorn a wall at the House of Lords in Westminster.

Her grandfather was a Greek immigrant who settled in Manchester and she visited his homeland through Greek government art scholarships, travelling the country, drawing and painting and seeing her work exhibited in Athens. When her husband retired 10 years ago, they decided to spend much of the year on the Greek island of Hydra, which became a second home for the rest of her life and provided fresh, vibrant colours and inspiration for her work.

Coulouris and her brother George were born in the New York City suburb of Spuyten Duyvil, in the Bronx. Their father moved to the US in the 1930s with his American wife Louise. Since her dad had to get to Hollywood to play the character Walter Parks Thatcher in Citizen Kane with Orson Welles, baby Mary Louise found herself on a train from New York to Los Angeles, where she was brought up in luxury in Beverly Hills. She found herself fussed over by friends of her dad, including movie stars such as Bette Davis and José Ferrer. Visits to the Hollywood film studios fired her imagination and she painted her first canvas at 11.

In the late 1940s her father became disillusioned with the campaigns led by anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy and decided to take his family back to England. They set sail for Southampton from Manhattan in November, 1949, and began a new life in London.

She first attended St. Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith and later Parliament Hill School in Camden, before doing a two-year course at Chelsea School of Art. She won a place at the highly respected Slade School of Fine Art, where she studied under the painter Sir William Coldstream and printmaker Anthony Gross. Her work attracted the attention of the artist LS Lowry, the writer John Steinbeck, art-collecting actors including Vincent Price and Stewart Granger and up-and-coming politician John Smith, future leader of the Labour Party. She was also granted a one-year French government scholarship to the Atelier 17 at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she developed her own colour etching technique under renowned painter/printmaker Stanley Hayter.

She met Gordon Wallace, a poetically inclined civil engineer, while she was drawing by the Regent's Canal in Camden Town in the late 1960s. They lived in Primrose Hill area, had two children and moved to Linlithgow in 1976.

She died in hospital in Edinburgh after battling motor neurone disease and is survived by her husband Gordon and children Saro and Duncan.