Nova Pilbeam turns 95

Nova Pilbeam and Derrick De Marney in Young and Innoent (1937)

Today marks the 95th birthday of British actress Nova Pilbeam, who as far as I know is still alive; at least, none of the usual sources list her as having died. Pilbeam didn't exactly have a long career, but she did wind up in a pair of Alfred Hitchcock movies that he made in the UK before coming over to the US. The first of these was the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much from 1934, in which Pilbeam plays the child who gets kidnapped.

The other, from which the picture above is taken, is Young and Innocent, which has Pilbeam playing the daughter of a police constable who winds up helping an escaping accused criminal (Derrick De Marney, pictured above), who is wrongly accused of having murdered an actress and dumping her body on the beach. It's a structure that of course would be used in several of Hitchcock's movies, notably The 39 Steps and Saboteur, but is very well done here. (I thought I had done a full-length post on this one before, but apparently not.)