Margaret Helen Stevenson was born in Manhattan on Feb. 8, 1912. Margaret went to the Brearley School in Manhattan and was about to enter Bryn Mawr College when the Depression hit.
Ms. Stevenson was, in the archaic phrase, a lady of the theater. The daughter of an actor and the mother of an actress, she appeared in a handful of movies and television shows (including a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” production of “Macbeth” in which she played Lady Macduff), but most of her career was spent on the stage.
A prolific performer in regional theater, on tour and in summer stock, she spent time in the 1950s in London, in the West End production of The Seven Year Itch as the wife of the wayward romantic. From the 1930s through the ’60s she appeared in more than a dozen Broadway shows. They included a 1935 revival of The Barretts of Wimpole Street the Rudolf Besier play about the poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, with Katharine Cornell; Robert E. Sherwood’s World War II drama The Rugged Path, directed by Garson Kanin and starring Spencer Tracy, in 1945; Ruth Gordon’s valentine to the theater, The Leading Lady, with John Carradine, Ossie Davis, Mildred Dunnock and Ms. Gordon, directed by Mr. Kanin, in 1948; and Triple Play an evening of one-acts by Chekhov, Sean O’Casey and Tennessee Williams with a cast that included Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, in 1959. In the late 1990's, while going blind from macular degeneration, she played her final stage role as Teiresias, the sightless seer, in the Euripides play.
