Anna Lee - Career

Career

Lee studied at the Royal Albert Hall, then debuted with a bit part in the film His Lordship (1932). When she and her first husband, director Robert Stevenson, moved to Hollywood she became associated with John Ford, appearing in several of his films, notably How Green Was My Valley, Two Rode Together and Fort Apache. She worked for producer Val Lewton in the horror/thriller Bedlam (1946) and had a lead role opposite Brian Donlevy and Walter Brennan in Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! (1943), a wartime thriller about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

Lee made frequent appearances on television anthology series in the 1940s and 1950s, including Robert Montgomery Presents, The Ford Theatre Hour, Kraft Television Theatre, Armstrong Circle Theatre and Wagon Train.

She had a small, but memorable, role as Sister Margaretta in The Sound of Music. Sister Margaretta was a supporter of Maria in the abbey and was one of the two nuns who thwarted the Nazis by removing car engine parts, allowing the Von Trapps to escape. Lee also appeared in the 1962 classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? as next-door neighbour Mrs. Bates alongside Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. In 1994, she took the leading role of the feature film What Can I Do?, directed by Wheeler Winston Dixon.

In later years, she became known to a new generation as the matriarch Lila Quartermaine in General Hospital and Port Charles until her sacking in 2003 by Jill Farren-Phelps, which was widely protested in the soap world and among General Hospital actors. According to fellow GH actress Leslie Charleson, Lee was promised a job for life by former GH executive producer Wendy Riche; when Riche left the show, the new management fired Lee. Charleson said in 2007, "The woman was in her 90s. And then when the new powers-that-be took over they fired her, and it broke her heart. It was not necessary."

One of her sons attested that the sacking sapped Lee's will to live. She died not long afterwards of pneumonia. Lee was interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.