the Winter Garden in May 1946 as Judith Drave in the long-running drama No Room at the Inn, and the St Martin's Theatre in January 1950 as Jennifer in Kenneth Horne's comedy A Lady Mislaid. Out of London she played in repertory with a succession of provincial companies, in Buxton, Croydon, Watford, Salisbury, Hornchurch and Coventry. Among the leading parts she played in repertory productions were Shaw's Saint Joan and Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. While playing in Buxton she met the actor Richard Bebb, whom she married in 1952; they had two sons. In 1955 Watford returned to the West End in a production of Ugo Betti's The Queen and the Rebels, transferred from Coventry to the Haymarket Theatre. This was her last stage appearance in London for nearly three years, as television began to dominate her career. First screen roles Watford made her film debut playing Lady Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher (1950), but as her obituarist in The Times put it, "the cinema was never really her medium", and along with her stage performances it was for her roles on television that she became best known. The first of the latter came in 1956 when she was cast as the Virgin Mary in BBC Television's eight-part dramatisation of the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. For the BBC and the commercial ITV network, Watford appeared over the next four years in new drama and adaptations of classics. Her roles in the latter included Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield, Catherine Winslow in The Winslow Boy and Mrs Arbuthnot in A Woman of No Importance. Among the new plays in which she starred on television was a 1958 piece by Clemence Dane, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I, of which the reviewer in The Daily Telegraph wrote: The Times said of this period that Watford and Billie Whitelaw were the two leading ladies of British television. In Watford's early television career she starred in new works by writers including Willis Hall, David Hare, Hugh Leonard and David Mercer. In 1959 she was voted best television actress in the Society of Film and Television Arts's awards (now the BAFTA awards). Her sole West End appearance during the late 1950s was at the Westminster Theatre in January 1959, playing Jane Pringle in a thriller, The Woman on the Stair.