Valerie Hobson
Image by/from Trailer screenshot, from DVD Bride of Frankenstein, Universal 2004
Valerie Hobson (born Babette Valerie Louise Hobson, 14 April 1917 – 13 November 1998) was an Irish-born actress who made an appearance in many films throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Her second husband was John Profumo, a government minister who grew to become the topic of a wonderful sex scandal in 1963.
Babette Louisa Valerie Hobson was created in Larne, County Antrim, in Ulster. Her father would be a captain within the Royal Navy.
Before she was 11 years of age, Hobson had started to study acting and dancing in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
In 1935, still in her own teens, she made an appearance as Baroness Frankenstein in Bride of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff and Colin Clive. She performed opposite Henry Shell that very same year in Werewolf based in london, the very first Hollywood werewolf film. The second 1 / 2 of the 1940s saw Hobson in possibly her two most memorable roles: because the adult Estella in David Lean’s adaptation of effective Expectations (1946), and because the refined and virtuous Edith D’Ascoyne within the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
In 1952 she divorced her first husband, film producer Anthony Havelock-Allan (1904-2003). In 1954, she married Brigadier John Profumo (1915-2006), an MP, quitting acting shortly later on. Profumo would be a prominent politician of Italian descent.
Hobson’s last starring role is at the initial London manufacture of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical take part in the King and that i, which opened up in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 8 October 1953. She performed Mrs. Anna Leonowens opposite Herbert Lom’s King. The show ran for 926 performances.
After Profumo’s ministerial career led to disgrace in 1963, following revelations he’d lied to home of Commons about his affair with Christine Keeler, Hobson was by him, plus they labored together for charitable organization through out her existence, though she did miss their more public personas.
Hobson’s oldest boy, Simon Anthony Clerveaux Havelock-Allan, was created in May 1944 with Down’s syndrome. Her middle child, Mark Havelock-Allan, was created on 4 April 1951 and grew to become the court. Her youngest child may be the author David Profumo (b. 16 October 1955), who authored Getting the home Lower: A Household Memoir (2006) concerning the scandal. Inside it, he writes his parents told him nothing from the scandal and the man discovered it from another boy in school.
After her dying, Hobson’s body was cremated in compliance together with her wishes. Half her ashes were interred in the household vault in Hersham. The remainder were scattered on 1 The month of january 1999 by her sons David Profumo and Mark Havelock-Allan, close to the family’s farm in Scotland. Hobson was portrayed by Deborah Grant within the film Scandal (1989), by Joanna Traveling in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical Stephen Ward the Musical, which opened up in the Aldwych Theatre on 19 December 2013, by Emilia Fox within the BBC small-series The Trial of Christine Keeler in 2019.
