Child star Nova Pilbeam shot to instant fame and plummeted just as
quickly. She made her film debut at the age of 14 in Berthold Viertal’s
Little Friend (1934). Pilbeam was a veteran stage performer by the time
Alfred Hitchcock
cast her as the youthful kidnap victim in The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). She went on to deliver a splendid
performance as the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey in Robert
Stevenson’s Tudor
Rose (1936). Her first significant adult role was that of the protagonist
beside Derrick De Marney in Hitchcock’s Young
and Innocent (1937). In 1939, Nova married director Penrose
‘Pen’ Tennyson, whom she had met whilst he worked as an assistant
to Hitchcock. The following year she appeared in the controversial Boulting
Brothers film Pastor
Hall (1940). In 1941, her husband, Pen, died in a plane crash after
being called-up during WWII to film some instructional shorts. Returning
to the screen after her husband’s death, she made a handful of unexceptional
films before abandoning the cinema in 1948.
