Mrs. John Bull, Ltd.

Even movie companies know the value of a permanent good thing. M-G-M British Studios has just signed English Actress Margaret Rutherford to a fresh, multiple-film contract. Margaret Rutherford is 71.

With audiences everywhere, she is very possibly the most popular of all British actresses. Her range of roles in her 33 films and 107 plays has been enormous--from Madame Arcati, the happy medium in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, to Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest. Her face and manner are unmistakably singular. She is the ultimate symbol of resourceful, tweedily eccentric British womanhood, of the old gals who go stamping across the heath in the wild rain, looking for stuffed shirts to poke with their umbrellas.

Sensible Fiend. Her snow-white hair is cotton candy. Her bulbous eyes swivel in a deep pouch. The nose is impertinent, and her great fierce jaw is pillowed in an accordion of jowls. She has been called a "splendidly padded windmill." When someone looks like that, it is less an occupation than a duty to appear in movies. She has just finished three new pictures, The Mouse on the Moon, The VIPs and Murder at the Gallop. In the latter, she is Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, crisply telling the police, "I shall have your murderer for you in a few hours, Inspector. Leave it to me." In pursuit of the killer, she rides a bike, rides a horse, and passes information while doing the twist.

She is so British that by comparison with her, even John Bull himself seems the son of a miscegenetic marriage. She is the fresh-air fiend in sensible shoes who parries with her nose and charges with her chin. She likes to scrunch into wicker chairs and sniff sea air. She has average tastes, nonexotic pleasures. Every day at precisely 11 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.--right in the middle of a movie set, if that's where she happens to be--she has hot milk and buttered biscuits. She needs this sustenance as much as a lush needs booze.

Smooth & Scatty. Infractions of etiquette upset her. Vulgarity makes her eyes flash. "I am not an intolerant woman, but I abominate stupidity," she says. Her withering stare could reduce a rabid dog to foaming jelly. She smiles lopsidedly at absurd questions. She gives lopsided answers too. Is she eccentric? "I hope I'm an individual. I suppose an eccentric is a superindividual. Perhaps an eccentric is just off-center--ex-centric. But that contradicts a belief of mine that we've got to be centrifugal."

She is now Margaret Rutherford, Ltd., having arrived rather late in life at the knowledge that there is one way to skin a tax cat. Endearingly, she has just been paying through the nose all these years, and "we are only, but only, just emerging," she notes, "in a rather sensational way, I must say." "We" includes her husband, Stringer Davis, an actor who appears in many of her films. They live in a sturdy old house in Buckinghamshire, the kind, says Stringer, "where you can shut the door without the tooth mugs falling off the bathroom shelf."

Margaret Rutherford was born in London in 1892. Her mother died when she was three. She was raised by an aunt, went to school in Wimbledon, and took her training at the Old Vic School of Acting.

Life went along smoothly for more than six decades until a hail of nerves flew at her a short time ago. "I went quite scatty," she says. "Fortunately, I was playing a scatty part in a play, so nobody noticed." Strong again now, she has enough reserve energy to read an occasional ghost story on the BBC. She believes in ghosts, of course. Once in a closet in the Haymarket Theater, she felt one's leg.

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