Margaretta Mary Winifred Scott (13 February 1912 – 15 April 2005) was an English stage, screen and television actress whose career spanned over seventy years. She is best remembered for playing the eccentric widow Mrs. Pumphrey in the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small (1978–1990). Early life Scott was born in London in 1912 to Bertha Eugene and Hugh Arthur Scott, a distinguished music critic. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she was a classmate of Celia Johnson. Acting career Scott began acting as a child, giving private performances of verse-speaking and dance drama to entertain her family and friends. In 1926, at the age of 14, she made her acting debut on the London stage as Mercutio's Page in a Fellowship of Players revival of Romeo and Juliet. Scott became a leading exponent of the work of William Shakespeare through a series of notable performances in the early and mid-1930s: Cast firstly as the Player Queen and then Ophelia in Hamlet, she followed this with Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing for the Oxford University Dramatic Society. She appeared as Viola at the New Theatre and as Ophelia and Juliet in a couple of BBC radio productions in 1932. In 1933 she played the first of four summer seasons at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park. She also played Lavinia in George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion with the rehearsals under the supervision of the author himself. In 1936 Scott was cast as Rosaline in one of the great productions of Love's Labours Lost at the Old Vic and in the following year performed in more Shakespeare which included her last appearance at the Open Air Theatre until 1984 in Ring Round the Moon. In addition to these classical roles, Scott's credits in contemporary drama have included the premieres of Emlyn Williams' A Murder Has Been Arranged (directed by the author in 1930), MacLeish's Panic (1936), Morna Stuart's Traitor's Gate (1938) and Sidney Howard's Alien Corn (1939). By 1939 Scott had become one of the United Kingdom's leading young stage actresses. Trade union organiser Scott was a signatory of the document that established Equity, the British actors' trade union, in 1934. Film career Scott's screen career began in 1934 when she made an uncredited appearance in Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Don Juan. Thereafter she reprised her stage role of