Before the second world war, a teenage Sheridan played the fresh-faced ingenue in a string of British features, including a snobbish daughter in Father Steps Out (1937) and a theatrical type in the murder mystery Landslide (also 1937) – the latter film co-starring her future husband Jimmy Hanley. Clips are hard to find for these cheap and cheerful pictures – it's not until cult caper Calling Paul Temple (1948) that we can get a look at Sheridan, then in her late 20s, in action. She played Steve, the vivacious wife of the suave crime novelist of the title, played by John Bentley.
And you can catch a glimpse of Sheridan doing some knitting while a precocious Petula Clark twangs her guitar in The Huggetts Abroad, one of the series of Huggetts movies in the late 40s. That's Hanley again, behind the wheel of the truck.
After appearing in David Lean's The Sound Barrier, Sheridan scored her big hit: the vintage-car-racing comedy Genevieve. Sheridan plays John Gregson's wife in a sweet-natured yarn about two couples competing against each other in the London-to-Brighton veteran-car rally. Released in 1953, it proved immensely popular at the box office and set the tone for further wacky-races movies, such as Around the World in 80 Days, The Great Race and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
At the height of her career, Sheridan had the misfortune – or misjudgment – to marry John Davis, the then managing director of Rank Films and the most widely despised man in the British film industry. Sheridan gave up her acting career as a result, and remained a wife and mother until they divorced in 1965. Her feature-film comeback came in 1970 with arguably her best-known role, the mother in The Railway Children.
Sheridan continued to work, mostly in TV, for many years subsequently, but it was this film which gave her the role for which she will surely be longest cherished.
