She was apparently, by the time she died, extremely tired of just being thought of as the Bride. She lived more than fifty years after the movie’s release, well into my own childhood, and she was quite sure that many of the children being dragged up to meet her didn’t know and didn’t care who she was. I myself would have known her better as any of the three roles she played for Disney, or even as Jessica Marbles in Murder by Death. I’m not sure I actually saw Bride of Frankenstein until adulthood.

But long before any of that, she did music hall and dance and the stage in general. Her tutelage under Isadora Duncan, whom she apparently disliked, was interrupted by World War I, given it was in Paris and all. So she went home and taught those skills to other children—she was born in 1902 herself and so was a child at the time—to bring in money to the family. She started a children’s theatre and a club called “the Cave of Harmony.” She recorded a couple of records. She then moved on to serious stage plays, and while acting, she met Charles Laughton, whom she married despite, as she found out considerably later, his homosexuality. And all this by 1929, with the Bride yet six years in her future.

She had a seriously bohemian childhood; her parents were unmarried, socialist, and atheists. She seems to have lived her life with similar principles to her parents, being a lifelong atheist herself. She also had a couple of abortions, though she herself never said the second left her unable to have children. In fact, what she said was that she didn’t have children because her husband was gay, though apparently one of those pregnancies was with Laughton. Still, she never seems to have considered divorcing him and was perfectly comfortable with him having his young men and her having a young man or two of her own, over the years.

I feel as though she’s an underrated actress, simply because most people’s knowledge of her begins with the Bride and ends with maybe Katie Nanna from Mary Poppins. She played no few Dotty Old Bats over the years, a characterization I suspect she enjoyed playing immensely. She played maids and aunts and Anne of Cleves—Anne of Cleves was a good role for her, honestly, and suited her both physically and in mood. She acted with her husband now and again, but they were never really a Hollywood couple in that sense.

Do I, initially, think of her as Emily Stowecroft of the Daughters of the Buccaneers in Blackbeard’s Ghost? It is true that I do. It is also true that there are disappointingly few screenshots online of what I think is a charming performance. (She is whimsical and ominous within seconds, which is not easy to pull off.) But, yeah, there’s Katie Nanna and the Bride and Jessica Marbles, and Miss Plimsoll, maid Matilda of The Bishop’s Wife, maid Martha of The Secret Garden. And in real life, she had a sly, witty sense of humour that carried well into her movies. She deserves more attention than she is generally paid.