Does anyone know anything of Maggie Kimberly?

[mercury66]

The rather enigmatic blonde actress who featured in 'The Mummy's Shroud'?



I think her appearance in some of the wonderfully lurid posters for the film - all cleavage and mummy (the stills with the mummy's arms reaching into frame toward her are great!) are pretty much iconic images of Hammer now.



From memory Miss Kimberly was one of those lucky sods who got to hang out in 60s London (while I was busy being born) and ended up marrying a Lord!



m

[m35541]

I think she was also the woman dragged to and burnt at the stake in Witchfinder General (most of her role was cut by the BBFC).

[cully]

Sadly, not an actress I can put a face to....and Google Images isn't much help!

[Euryale]

This article is from the Borehamwood & Elstree Times, August 2002:



Good lord! It's our Maggie



By Lorna McVicars



If there is one thing that people remember about Molly's cafe in Borehamwood, it is that the owner's very beautiful' daughter married the Earl of Kimberley. Reporter LORNA McVICARS investigates



The story of beautiful, young Maggie Simons being plucked from her ordinary upbringing, by the handsome aristocrat who had fallen for her, has assumed a Cinderella-like quality as it has passed from mouth to mouth in Borehamwood.



Inspired by people's memories of a fairytale love story, the Borehamwood & Elstree Times traced the former Maggie Kimberley to her Florida home to find out what really happened once upon a time in a town just outside London.



It is not surprising the 4th Earl of Kimberley fell for Maggie. In his memoirs, The Whim of the Wheel, he recalls being head-over-heels in love with the woman who was: "Very beautiful, stunningly so, with a wonderful figure you could not better today. And she had a brain and was witty. I thought she was the most beautiful looking female creature I had ever seen."



After leaving behind her school days, at St Teresa's, Furzehill and Hillside schools, Maggie trained at London's prestigious Lucy Clayton Finishing School, before moving into modelling and acting.



At the age of 20, she left the family's Cardinal Avenue home and moved to London, where she modelled for fashion magazines like Vogue, appeared in television commercials and shared a flat in Grosvenor Square with Crossroads actress Sue Lloyd.



Maggie, now 64, recalled meeting Johnny Kimberley, also called Johnny Wodehouse, in swinging '60s London: "We met socially several times in London at different people's dinner parties and it all went from there.



"It was an exciting time in every way it was a wonderful time to be alive."



The earl wrote, in his memoirs, that he had to pursue Maggie because, at first, she refused to go out with him, believing the three-times married, 35-year-old London playboy, who gambled with the Aspinall-Lucan set, only wanted to go to bed with her. But, after just a week of dates at restaurants and nightclubs, he proposed, to the shock and excitement of her parents. The couple married at Westminster's Caxton Hall in 1961.



But when it comes to describing her marriage, at the age of 23, as a fairytale, Maggie's cut-glass English voice sounds reticent.



"I suppose you could say it was a fairytale. I did not have any dreams of anything like that happening we fell in love and it happened. A little girl from Borehamwood, I suppose a lot of people thought of it as a fairytale."



"It happened quite a bit a model girlfriend of mine married an earl. In the modelling profession you meet these people it is part of the scene," she added.



Also, by the time Maggie met the earl, he had both inherited, at age 17, and sold, at the age of 32, the Norfolk mansion and land his forbears had held for five centuries to finance his extravagant lifestyle.



His memoirs recall: "When we met and married, Maggie was in love with me, not with what I was. We were very, very happy until I blew it."



He also recalls that Maggie "had never touched my kind of life" of honeymooning in the South of France, socialising in the town and country, living in a cottage on the Thames, shooting and holidaying in Jamaica.



However, Maggie paints a slightly different picture: "I had already been round the London scene. We had lots of friends in common friends of mine were friends of his, so it was quite easy."



The earl never did join his wife on a visit to Borehamwood the home town she believes triggered her desire to go into modelling and acting, with the excitement of the film studios and the likes of Errol Flynn, Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Field visiting Molly's cafe, which her parents ran.



The earl's memoirs recall a happy marriage for three years, before he returned to his womanising ways and Maggie ended their marriage in 1965 she was the first woman to serve divorce papers on him.



Maggie, who had her only child, Charles Wodehouse, with the earl, said of her former husband, with a hint of amusement: "He was a naughty boy".



After the divorce, Maggie went back into acting, starring in the Hammer classic The Mummy's Shroud in 1967.



She left London for a few years, and moved with her son to Norfolk, before returning to Mill Hill. In 1992 she married an old friend, Scott Griffith, and moved to Las Vegas, where his public relations business was based. Following her husband's death four years ago, Maggie moved to Florida.



The earl died in May this year, aged 78, leaving behind his sixth wife and four sons.



E.

[mercury66]

Waow,



Thanks for finding the Borehamwood & Elstree Times article. I'm thinking that's maybe where I picked up the few snippets of info I had, but some years back.



Pretty amazing tale, if worlds away from any world I recognise.



I've attached a link to prints that a US collector sold on eBay earlier in the year. They are period prints from original UK negatives, which are of very high quality and therefore sought after, I'm told.



m



http://picasaweb.google.com/ewanlaud...eat=directlink