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Mary Ure 1933 - 1975

Mary Ure was born on February 18, 1933 in Glasgow, Glasgow City County, Scotland United Kingdom, and died at age 42 years old on April 3, 1975 in London, Nd. Family, friend, or fan, this family history biography is for you to remember Mary Ure.

Mary Ure

February 18, 1933

Glasgow, Glasgow City County, Scotland, United Kingdom

April 3, 1975

London, Nd, United Kingdom

Female

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Mary Ure Mary Ure (1933 - 1975)

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Mary Ure's History: 1933 - 1975

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Introduction

She was the daughter of Colin McGregor Ure, then a master drainpipe maker and later a civil engineer, and his wife, history teacher Edith Hannah Eileen Mary Swinburne. Colin’s father was one of John Ure’s sons, flour miller William Primrose Ure, who lived at Balvaird, which was then at 11 Abercromby Street East, until his death on December 4 1939. When Colin married coal exporter’s daughter Edith on July 2 1925 at Glasgow’s St Mary’s Cathedral, he left Balvaird and they settled in her home at 17 Kelvinside Terrace South. Edith was still living there when she died of cancer on June 8 1945. At this time her husband was serving as a Major in the Royal Engineers. Mary Eileen Ure was born in Glasgow on February 18 1933, and was educated at the city’s Laurel Bank School. She then went to the independent Mount School in York, and early in her school career showed an aptitude for the theatre. During the Festival of Britain in 1951 there was a nationwide search for an actress to appear as Mary in the York Mystery Plays. Mary’s headmistress urged her to try her luck and she was chosen for the part at the age of sixteen. E.Martin Browne, the producer, was so impressed by her talent that he advised her to study in London at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she enrolled for a teaching course. There, during her first year, she appeared in a different play every three weeks and at the end of the year decided that acting rather than teaching was to be her life's work. She won a scholarship on graduation offered by the BBC, but did not accept it as a West End management also offered her a year's contract, and she preferred to try her luck in the live theatre. Vibrant, blonde and attractive, she began performing on the London stage and quickly developed a reputation for her abilities as a dramatic actress. Her first  stage appearance was in Simon and Laura in 1954 at the Opera House, Manchester, and she made her London debut as Amanda in the Jean Anouilh play Time Remembered at the Lyric Theatre and was acclaimed by the critics. It ran eighteen months in the West End. In 1955 her father remarried, and soon after moved from Glasgow to the Kilcreggan mansion Rockingham where Mary was a regular guest. He died there in 1963, and later Mary’s stepmother moved to 28 Dalmore Crescent in Helensburgh. While playing a leading role as Alison Porter in John Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger, Mary began a relationship with the married playwright, and after he obtained a divorce they married in 1957. In 1958, she was in the Broadway production of Look Back in Anger and earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Dramatic Actress. The following year she starred with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom in the film version, and according to Burton’s biography they had an affair. She also had a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon Avon, starring as Desdemona in Othello with Paul Robeson, Albert Finney, Diana Rigg and Vanessa Redgrave. By this point, her marriage to the womanising Osborne was already falling apart. The playwright could be cold and detached, and he did not hold his wife in particularly high esteem, as he wrote in the second volume of his memoirs. She began an affair that year with actor Robert Shaw while they co-starred in The Changeling at London's Royal Court Theatre. She became pregnant, and gave birth to a son, naming him Colin Murray Osborne despite his physical resemblance to Shaw. In 1960 she appeared in the film Sons and Lovers as Clara Dawes, and was nominated for both the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She was the second Scottish actress to receive an Oscar nomination, the first being Deborah Kerr who spent her early years in Helensburgh. She married Robert Shaw on April 13 1963 and he legally adopted Colin, who then became Colin Murray Shaw. Later, the couple had three more children. That year, after an absence of three years, she returned to cinema screens with a good performance in The Mind Benders with Dirk Bogarde, a sci-fi drama. Then it was The Luck of Ginger Coffey in 1964 and the flawed Custer of the West in 1967, both with her husband. Neither of these productions made a significant impact, though she performed admirably. Mary Ure made her only big-budget blockbuster, Where Eagles Dare, with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. It was a huge success but it was five years before Mary's next, and last, film appearance in A Reflection of Fear, starring her husband. She did continue to perform on stage, but — despite professional success and enjoying motherhood — her personal life was in turmoil as Shaw’s ego could not stand having a successful wife. So he impregnated her Nanny. Her growing alcoholism affected her career to the point that she was fired from the 1974 pre-Broadway production of Love for Love and was replaced by her understudy, Glenn Close. Her mental health also deteriorated and she suffered depression as Shaw had an affair with his secretary. On April 2 1975 she appeared on the London stage at the Comedy Theatre with Honor Blackman and Brian Blessed in The Exorcism. It was a disastrous opening night, and next morning she was found dead of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates by her husband in their Curzon Street, London, home. It is not known if it was suicide or accidental. She was not alone drinking champagne. The Nanny was pregnant with her husband's baby and he married the Nanny.She was just 42. Mary was buried at London Road Cemetery in Coventry, although it is not known why this cemetery was chosen.
02/18

1933

Birthday

February 18, 1933

Birthdate

Glasgow, Glasgow City County, Scotland United Kingdom

Birthplace

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Nationality & Locations

Scottish.
Religious Beliefs

Church of England.
Professional Career

Broadway Star. West End London Star. Movie Star.
04/3

1975

Death

April 3, 1975

Death date

accidental poisoning

Cause of death

London, Nd United Kingdom
Death location

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Obituary

MARY URE DEAD; ACTRESS WAS 42 By Albin Krebs April 4, 1975 New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared. Mary Ure, a leading British stage and screen actress who won her first critical acclaim for “Look Back in Anger” in 1957 and an Academy Award nomination in 1961, died in London yesterday only hours after opening a run in a new play, “The Exorcism.” She was 42 years old. Miss Ure's body was found by her husband, Robert Shaw, the actor and playwright, shortly after noon in the Mayfair apartment they had recently rented. She was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Georges Hospital. The police said that there were no suspicious circumstances, but that a routine coroner's investigation would be made. Fellow actors in the supernatural thriller in which Miss Ure returned to the London stage said that she had been ill during rehearsals and had a severe case of first‐night nerves before Wednesday's opening performance. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, an Feb. 18, 1933, Miss Ure was the daughter of Colin McGregor Ure, a civil engineer, and the former Edith Swinburne. She received her basic education at the Mount School in York, England. Played Virgin Mary At the age of 16, on the recommendation of the headmistress of Mount School, Miss Ure was chosen to play the Virgin Mary in a revival of the Cycle of Mystery Plays, which date from the Middle Ages. They were presented in York as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951. The new producers, impressed with her talent, arranged for Miss Ure to study at London's Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, where she stayed three years. Her professional stage debut came in 1954 in Manchester and that same year she was seen on a London stage for the first time as the star of Jean Anouilh's “Time Remembered.” Miss Ure's success was that twift, and it continued. She was Ophelia to Paul Scofield's Hamlet in 1955 and in the years to follow was seen on the British stage as Desdemona and Titania. In 1956, while she was appearing in London, using a Brooklyn accent in Arthur Miller's “A View From the Bridge,” Miss Ure met John Osborne, identified at the time as one of the British theater's “angry young men,” who had won attention with plays on themes that sometimes rudely questioned the traditional values of morality and patriotism. They were married shortly before Mr. Osborne's “Look Back in Anger” become a hit of the 1957 Broadway season. In praising her performance in that play, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times said, “As the tormented wife, Mary Ure succeeds in retaining the pride of an intelligent young woman by filling her silences with unspoken vitality, by being alive and by glowing with youth in every sequence.” Miss Ure's performance in the 1959 film version of the play was similarly well‐received. In 1961, Miss Ure appeared at the Royal Court Theater in London in Middleton's‐ “The Changeling” with Mr. Shaw, married and the father of four children. She bore their first child in September of that year, divorced Mr. Osborne the following year, and was married to Mr. Shaw in 1963. They had three more children. Miss Ure and Mr. Shaw costarred in the Broadway production of Harold Pinter's “Old Times” in 1971. Previously she had been seen in London, in the nineteen‐sixties, in Arthur Miller's “The Crucible” and in New I York co‐starring with the late Vivien Leigh in “Duel of Angels.” 1961 Oscar Nomination Miss Ure's Oscar nomination, in 1961, was for her role in “Sons and Lovers.” Her other movies included “The Luck of Ginger Coffey” and “Custer of the West,” both co‐starring Mr. Shaw, and “Where Eagles Dare.” Miss Ure was a strikingly beautiful woman with blond hair. Her eyes were a light blue, and her seemingly flawless skin had a porcelain paleness about tit. She was a nonstop talker, with forceful, sometimes shockingly expressed opinions. She and Mr. Shaw enjoyed what she described last November as “a gloriously loving, combative. thoroughly agreeable‐to‐us disagreeable relationship.” In November of last year Miss Ure was discharged from the cast of a revival of Congreve's “Love for Love” only two days before it opened in New York. Her legal action against the director, Harold Prince, was submitted to arbitration, but no decision has been announced. Critics in London, reviewing, “The Exorcism” yesterday, found Miss Ure the best thing to recommend it. “Back on the London stage after too long away, Mary Ure gives a nicely judged mixture of the mystical and the matter of fact, commented The Evening News.

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Mary Ure lived 32 years shorter than the average family member when died at the age of 42.

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