The actor, the fascist, and the reincarnated queen
That is not the title of an unrealised Peter Greenaway film, nor the pub-going cast list of the opening line to a joke, but three roles occupied by Mary Taviner (1909-1972).
Mary Taviner, c. 1939. British Library Add MS 89481/10, f. 50
Taviner’s acting career comprised just four films (one of which was as a nine-year-old). Contemporary and modern critics agree that there was nothing wrong with these melodramatic stories of ghosts, spies, and murder, apart from the acting, the plots, and the scripts that is! Her stage career lasted longer; from a 1924 London production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she continued to work until the year of her death. Again, notices were mixed. Her only cheerleaders seem to be have been her local newspapers, basking in the glory of having a ‘star’ in their neighbourhood.
Politically, Taviner was on the far-right. She was a pre-war member of the British Union of Fascists and appeared in a production staged by the Never Again Association, a front for extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism. Her 1954 film The Devil’s Jest was a vehicle for her view that Britain and Germany should have allied against communism rather than fight each other. She even sported an Iron Cross on a bracelet.
Taviner had a confused relationship with leading fascists. She fell in love with Oswald Mosley only to later unsuccessfully sue him for breach of promise. In this action she enlisted the help of William Joyce (later known as Lord Haw-Haw), who had fallen out with Mosley in 1937. Yet she later turned on Joyce, accusing him of running a 300-strong pre-war spy ring under the noses of the intelligence services.
She was still working for the fascist cause in the 1960s, and was involved with the White Defence League, Mosley’s Union Movement, and the Young Britain Movement, closely linked to the UM. She tried to organise a conference of European fascists in Marylebone only for the local council to ban it and she stood as a UM candidate in the Kensington borough elections in 1962 but mustered just 78 votes.
What of that third role Taviner inhabited? Her claim to be the reincarnation of Mary, Queen of Scots, (she even had her portrait painted as the queen) was the pinnacle of her many fantastical claims about herself. She claimed her mother was the offspring of German and British aristocrats; she was not. Taviner styled herself Baroness Marovna, the widow of a scion of the Romanovs, but no such barony existed. She was supposedly elected spiritual leader of Scotland by an organisation that has left no trace of its existence. She claimed to have worked in British intelligence during the war; she had not. Her story about Joyce’s spy ring was a fiction. All these tales smack of Taviner trying to make herself more interesting to producers and directors.
Despite such an interesting life she remains a peripheral figure. Her death went almost unnoticed; even The Stage, the theatre’s leading newspaper, missed it. She is not mentioned in the books written by or about the actors and directors she worked with and there are only passing mentions in a tiny fraction of the books written about British fascists and fascism.
Michael St John-Mcalister
Manuscripts Catalogue and Process Manager
Further reading:
Facts, Fictions, and Fascism: A Life of Actor Mary Taviner (1909–1972),
Add MS 89481/10