The daughter of a clergyman, Anna Lee was born Joan Boniface Winnifrith and encouraged to pursue an acting career by her father. After training at London's Royal Albert Hall, she took to the boards and later began appearing in English films, first as an extra, then working her way up to featured parts and finally earning the unofficial title "Queen of the Quota Quickies". Lee and her husband, director Robert Stevenson, relocated to Hollywood in the late 1930s and Lee began starring in stateside productions as well as becoming a fixture of the John Ford stock company (she appeared in How Green Was My Valley, Fort Apache and a half-dozen others). In 1970, she became the seventh wife of novelist, poet and playwright Robert Nathan (Portrait of Jennie, The Bishop's Wife); they married three months after they met. Now widowed, Lee soldiers on, regularly playing wealthy Lila Quartermaine on the TV soaper General Hospital.



Mother of actress Venetia Stevenson. She is the Goddaughter of Arthur Conan Doyle. She was awarded M.B.E. (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 1982 for her services to drama. Was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident, and acted in a wheelchair for more than two decades. Amber Tamblyn originally portrayed the adopted granddaughter of Lee's character on "General Hospital" (1963). In the 1950s (long before Tamblyn's birth), Tamblyn's father, Russ Tamblyn, was married to Lee's daughter Venetia Stevenson. One of three children born to an Anglican clergyman at St. Peters Church in Ightham, Kent, her godmother was legendary actress Sybil Thorndike. Initially studied with Elsie Fogarty at the Royal Albert Central School Hall in London. Later toured with the London Repertory Theatre where she earned the title "The British Bombshell." During WWII, she volunteered for overseas duty with the U.S.O. entertaining Allied troops in North Africa, Iran, and Sicily. In the film Bedlam (1946), Anna darkened her hair so that audiences would take her more seriously and kept it dark for much of the next few years. One of her costumes was worn by Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939). Had three sons from her second marriage: John, Steven and Timothy. John passed away in 1986. Grandmother of Actor Evan Stafford.