Film and radio star of the 1940s who later found TV fame in the soap Howards' Way

Although as an actor in films of the 1940s she was best known in ladylike and thoroughly English rose types of role, Dulcie Gray, who has died aged 95, had a background and overall career that was more cosmopolitan and interesting than that might suggest. She was in some ways the more complex half of the successful marital and professional stage and film partnership of Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray.

In The Glass Mountain (1949), in which a married composer loves an Italian girl who saved his life during the second world war, Gray, then one of the great stars of the British film industry, almost inevitably played the wronged but agonisingly understanding English wife. It was the sort of role for which she was most often chosen: the inconspicuous, quietly adoring woman able and...