Betty Box
| Betty Box | |
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Betty Box in 1959
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| Born |
Betty Evelyn Box 25 September 1915 Beckenham, Kent, England |
| Died | 15 January 1999 (aged 83) Chiltern, Buckinghamshire |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Film producer |
Betty Evelyn Box, OBE (25 September 1915 – 15 January 1999) was a prolific British film producer. Usually credited as Betty E. Box, she is considered one of the best of her generation, with a flair for making genuinely popular British films.
Born in Beckenham, Kent, England, she planned to be a commercial artist or journalist.
She entered the motion picture industry in 1942, joining her brother Sydney Box and his wife Muriel at Verity Films, where she helped produce more than 200 wartime propaganda shorts. Box:
Sitting around was no good for me, my brother said, and he asked me to work for him. He was running an organisation that made training and recruitment films. 1 went along as a general dogsbody, and as more men were called up, there were more opportunities for me. We worked from 7 a.m. until 10 or 11 at night. I learnt more in those two years than I would in ten years in peacetime.
Following World War II, she made an easy transition to feature films, beginning with The Years Between in 1946.
When her brother assumed control of Gainsborough Pictures that year, he named her Head of Production at the Poole Street, Hoxton studio, where she produced ten films during the next two years. While tight budgets and shooting schedules compromised the quality of some of them, others - such as When the Bough Breaks (1947) - proved to be among the most politically interesting films of the period.
"Every story I have at the moment has a murder in it," she said in 1947. "It's no wonder I'm being called 'Bloodthirsty Box'."
She was also known for the trio of popular Huggetts films, starting with Here Come the Huggetts in 1948 and followed by Vote for Huggett and The Huggetts Abroad in 1949.
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