by Mary Law, who has died aged 91, had two stints playing innkeeper Mollie Ralston in Agatha Christie’s long-running West End show The Mousetrap; She was also a pioneer of television in the 1950s, becoming the first British television actress to go into space – as science student Janet Campbell in the children’s series The Lost Planet (1954) – and quickly made appearances in soap operas the hospital’s Emergency Ward 10.
With blue eyes, blonde hair and a very expressive face, Mary Law became the fifth actress to play Agatha Christie’s leading lady when she joined the cast of The Mousetrap in 1956. She was still in the role when the show arrived its 1,998th performance in September 1957, making it the longest-running play in British theater history. It continues today, having now racked up almost 30,000 performances.
After leaving the Mousetrap in 1958, she returned a year later to guest star in Wormwood Scrubs; towards the end of the performance two prisoners managed to break out. Mary Law also recalled with some horror how the captive audience shouted during a stampede on stage: “Kill her! Kill her!”
Her most notable film appearance was in the 1960 comedy Carry on Constable, playing a shop assistant who suspiciously eyes rookie cops Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey who are disguised as female shoppers.
“I always remember Charlie Hawtrey coming to ask me how to wear a pair of very high heels and walk properly,” she told nostalgia website Retroboy, adding that most of the scenes were captured in one take. . “I had to spend a very tired morning running after him [Hawtrey] and Kenneth Williams somewhere in London.”
Mary Elisabeth Law was born in Croydon on 23 September 1932, the only child of Oliver Law, an architect, and his wife Marjorie “Madge”, née Nutter, an amateur theater enthusiast. Among Mary’s wartime memories were plumes of white steam and black smoke from bombing or dogfights in the skies over the Sussex Downs, where she would ride.
As a child she wanted to be a dancer until A Midsummer Night’s Dream enchanted her. She performed her first plays at schools in Worthing and West Chiltington and after attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts made her debut at Regent’s Park Open Air Theater in Shakespeare productions directed by Robert Atkins. “We had to compete with the roaring of the lions from the zoo,” she said.
On television she played a nurse in A Place of Execution (1953) and the Duchess of York in the Shakespeare adaptation An Age of Kings (1960) with Eileen Atkins, Sean Connery and Patrick Garland.
She appeared alongside Peter Vaughan in the newspaper series Deadline Midnight (1960) which, like The Lost Planet, was first broadcast live and in black and white. Later “we went to the filming with color and recording”, she said. Her first film appearance was as an office girl in the romantic comedy For Better, for Worse (1954) with Dirk Bogarde.
Mary Law was back on stage in 1955 as one of the three witches in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Macbeth with Laurence Olivier, and Dulcie Gray’s Love Affair at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. The following year she played neurotic woman Kay Strange in Agatha Christie’s murder mystery Towards Zero, adapted from her novel, before joining The Mousetrap. She returned to the team from 1975 to 1976, again as Mollie Ralston.
Still in the West End, in the mid-1960s she played Lady (Emilia) Dilke to Anthony Quayle’s adulterous politician Sir Charles Dilke in The Right Honorable Gentleman with Anna Massey, Corin Redgrave and Coral Browne. At other times she was in a weekly store around the country, rehearsing one show during the day and performing the other show in the evening.
In recent years Mary Law has become a passionate environmentalist, campaigning against proposals for fracking near her home in West Sussex. In the eighties she volunteered at an animal sanctuary founded by her neighbor Patrick Garland and actress Alexandra Bastedo.
In 1960 she married the orchestra and theater director Kenneth Alwyn in a rain ceremony at St Paul’s Church, the actors’ church in Covent Garden. They sometimes worked together, presenting a 1979 Radio 2 series called That’s Entertainment with guests including Tommy Steele, Marti Caine and Max Jaffa.
She also told the story of the Second World War for her husband’s 1990 Battle of Britain concert tour of North America, which featured wartime classics with the BBC Concert Orchestra and the RAF Command Band.
Alwyn died in 2020 and is survived by their daughter, Timandra, who was a child actress, Mary Law. Their other daughter, Lucy, died of a brain tumor last year.
Mary Law, born 23 September 1932, died 15 April 2024
