Meriel Forbes

Meriel Forbes, Lady Richardson (13 September 1913 – 7 April 2000) was an English actress. She was a granddaughter of Norman Forbes-Robertson and great-niece of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson. After making her stage debut with her father's touring company in 1929 she progressed via provincial repertory to the West End, where she appeared continually from the 1930s to the 1970s.

She married the actor Ralph Richardson in 1944, and the couple regularly appeared together in London, and on tour in the UK, continental Europe, Australia and North and South America. She made her first film in 1934 and made fourteen more films between then and 1969.

Forbes was born Muriel Elsa Florence Forbes-Robertson in Fulham, London, daughter of Frank Forbes-Robertson and his wife Honoria, née McDermot. She was educated in Eastbourne, Brussels and Paris. At the age of sixteen she made her first stage appearance, in her father's touring company in 1929, as Mrs de Hooley in The Passing of the Third Floor Back by Jerome K Jerome. After a short spell with the Dundee Repertory company in 1931, she made her first London appearance in the same year, as Simone D'Ostignac in Porcupine Point by Gabriel Toyne.

In 1931 she joined the Birmingham Repertory company, and then worked mostly in the West End. She was briefly engaged to Robert Morley in the 1930s and later had an affair with Robert Donat.

In 1934 Forbes made her film debut in Girls, Please!, which starred the comic actor Sydney Howard. Among her West End roles was Daisy in The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse (1937), which starred Ralph Richardson. Most of her roles were in modern plays, but she was also cast in the classics, including The Rivals (as Julia at the Old Vic, 1938), and the Strand in 1940. In 1940 and 1941 she served in the auxiliary nursing organisation the Voluntary Aid Detachment. In 1944 she married the widowed Richardson. They had one son, Charles, who became a television stage manager.

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