Margherita Harrison Evans (1909-81) appeared in around 80 films, well over half of them as a child actor in the 1910s and 20s.
Evans took a six-year break at 15, learning her craft on the stage. She came back in 1930 and was soon typecast as one of Hollywood’s ‘good girls’. In that capacity she lived (and died) in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood. She also played one of Dickens’s good women, Agnes, in David Copperfield (1935).
Typecasting led to a paucity of challenging roles, which Evans deeply resented. In a well-known interview with Leonard Maltin she said: “I don’t want to be a sort of female George M. Cohan. I want to get me a long jade green cigarette holder, drooping eyelids, and drooling earrings and a personality to match.”
By 1938, Evans had had enough, and gave up screen acting to return to the stage, before retiring completely in 1943. She returned to acting in the 1950s with a number of television appearances.
