Margaret Rawlings, Lady Barlow, actress; born Osaka, Japan, June 8, 1906, died May 19, 1996

A GIFTED actress with striking looks and a wonderful voice, Margaret Rawlings' reputation has suffered from her longevity, a career which tended for personal reasons to be intermittent, and the fact that she never became a major British film actress.

Her roles on film and in television were relatively few. The cinema, but above all films on television, keep memories alive which otherwise die as those who saw her on the stage pass on. She was never in the fullest sense a star, but she was a formidable leading lady with great stage presence, magnetic rather than beautiful, who could speak verse exquisitely.

In the British theatre tragediennes have been few and far between and few were better than Rawlings. The one great tragic role that eluded her was Cleopatra.

Born in Osaka, Japan, where her father, a missionary, was headmaster of an English school, she was educated first in a local convent, then at Oxford High School and Lady Margaret Hall where she read French. But after a year as a student she left to join the Charles Macdona Players at Croydon, appearing in a series of plays by George Bernard Shaw.

Her first major impact on London audiences came in 1931 when she played Salome at the Gate, performing the dance of the Seven Veils so effectively that there were nightly swoonings in the audience. She toured extensively in North America, New Zealand and Australia, where she met the young Robert Helpman and urged him to try his luck in London.

In 1935 she rejoined the Macdona Players as the leading lady in its Shavian repertoire, and later that year appeared in New York to acclaim in a play about Charles Parnell which she brought to London, first at the Gate and then the New Theatre.

She married twice and had many lovers. Her first husband was the actor Gabriel Toyne, a marriage which lasted from 1927 to 1938. In 1942 she married her second husband, Sir Robert Barlow, by whom she had a daughter, and retired temporarily from the stage.

She returned in 1946 in two productions by her protege, Helpman. In Webster's The White Devil she played Vittoria Corombona opposite Helpman as Flamineo and was hypnotic. She went on to play Lady Macbeth to Alec Clunes' Macbeth setting, so the legend goes, the Arts theatre alight with her intensity.

She was Zabina to Donald Wolfit's Tamburlaine at the Old Vic in 1951 where she told the great actor manager to mend his ways. Wolfit, who only ever wanted to be centre stage, had taken to fidgeting when anybody else held the limelight. One night as the imprisoned Zabina she told him after he had misbehaved: ``Donald, if you do that again I shall rattle my chains all through your next speech.'' He behaved.

In 1953 she appeared with Noel Coward at the Haymarket in The Applecart. In 1963 she starred in her own translation of Phedre before retiring to look after her husband who was in ill health. After his death in 1976 she came out of retirement, surprising those, as she noted, who had thought she had died too.

In 1982 she scored a huge success at the Vaudeville theatre as the ancient Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, in Jason Lindsey's monodrama. It was to be her last West End appearance. She took the piece on tour round Britain and to Dublin, and continued to broadcast and give poetry recitals almost to the end of her life.

Her films included one classic, Billy Wilder's Roman Holiday in which she plays the distracted lady in waiting to Audrey Hepburn's truant princess, but the remainder consists of the odd Hammer movie like Hands of the Ripper (1971) and a couple of British B features, bread-and-butter works bearing no relation to her stage career.

WILLIAM RUSSELL