Marvin also enlisted her fellow London critics to serve as judges, and for a long time she paid for the awards out of her own pocket. \u201cI cashed in my old age annuity, I thought what the hell, let the government take care of me,\u201d she once explained. \u201cListen, if you don\u2019t put your money where your heart is, forget it.\u201d The awards later attracted other supporters including the National Theatre, Actors\u2019 Equity and the V&A\u2019s theatre department; they ran until 2017 and were revived in 2023 as part of the Critics\u2019 Circle Theatre Awards.<\/p>\n
She was born Blanche Zohar in New York City in 1925. Her father was an opera singer and something of a ladies\u2019 man, and was uninterested in Blanche and her brothers and sisters. She left home at 14, babysitting to pay her way, and went to college at 16. Her parents never tried to find her, she once claimed, because they knew she was finished with them, and she had never felt a close attachment to any of her siblings.<\/p>\n
![\"Blanche](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/0c0809d1-8de9-49af-8bbc-d4fb9949b291.jpg\")
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Marvin during her time as an actress in New York<\/p>\n
MARCUS BLECHMAN<\/p>\n
At 19 she began auditioning for various ing\u00e9nue roles. Her first stage appearance was in Lute Song (1946), a Chinese musical starring Yul Brynner. She had seven parts and understudied Mary Martin, while a young Nancy Davis (later Nancy Reagan<\/a>) was also in the show. \u201cShe was a stick, she couldn\u2019t move and she couldn\u2019t act so they kept her still,\u201d was Marvin\u2019s caustic recollection.<\/p>\n Marlon Brando once made a pass at her: \u201cI said, \u2018Marlon, I wouldn\u2019t know what to do with you, you like boys as well as girls, I can\u2019t deal with that\u2019. I told him to go work on his speech for the play he was in. He just said, \u2018I hate acting, but it\u2019s better than working in a store from nine to five, and you meet lovely people\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n By then she had met and fallen for a theatre producer, Mark Marvin, who was 17 years her senior and about to co-produce (with its black star, Canada Lee) On Whitman Avenue, a socially significant play about a respectable black family who move into a white neighbourhood. Because of Blanche\u2019s youth, Mark wanted her to be free to meet other suitors, but she insisted that she should not have to go searching when she had already found her soulmate. <\/p>\n In 1945, through the stage director Margo Jones, who was living with Mark, she met the budding playwright Tennessee Williams<\/a>, who was still unknown. Jones was directing (and Mark producing) the first Broadway production of a Williams play, The Glass Menagerie, and she asked Blanche along to rehearsals as a distraction for the anxious writer. They bonded over their shared terror of Broadway and their rootlessness \u2014 \u201cWe used to talk about how we lived, how we felt. We were safe with one another,\u201d she recalled. Williams borrowed her first name for Blanche DuBois, the leading female character in his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire<\/a>, while Zohar, which she told him meant \u201cbright like a star\u201d, was thought to have inspired his choice of Stella for the first name of the other main female character. <\/p>\n Streetcar was produced to ecstatic acclaim on Broadway in 1947. Marvin later claimed that she had also had a hand in DuBois\u2019s most famous line: \u201cI\u2019ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.\u201d She told The Independent on Sunday: \u201cHe [Tennessee] talked about living in hotel rooms all the time and was unhappy. He said he was always living with strangers. I said, \u2018I\u2019ve only known kindness from strangers and so can you\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n After her introduction to Williams she continued to combine acting, dancing and modelling, taking small parts in films such as Casbah (1948) and Quo Vadis? (1951). While working in Europe, \u201cI got a telegram from Mark saying \u2018Meet me in Paris\u2019, where he proposed. I dropped everything.\u201d <\/p>\n She and Mark married in 1950. They had a daughter, Niki, and a son, Herbert. As a baby her son appeared unresponsive to sounds and Blanche defied medical opinion to establish that he was profoundly deaf. She was determined that he should have as fulfilling a life as possible and when he was four years old she had him running the lighting board in her theatre. Herbert is now an expert in deaf mental health, while Niki became an Oscar-nominated film producer, with The Shawshank Redemption (1994) among her credits. <\/p>\n Marvin in 1954. Her husband Mark died four years later<\/p>\n EVENING STANDARD\/HULTON ARCHIVE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n For much of the 1950s the Marvins divided their time between London and New York. Mark became terminally ill with cancer and in 1958 took his own life to spare his wife from caring for an ill husband. \u201cHe always looked after me and loved me with a depth I shall never have again,\u201d she once said.<\/p>\n In 1959 she became artistic director of the Cricket Theatre, among the first of New York City\u2019s off-Broadway theatres, where she also launched the Merri-Mimes production company for children. She oversaw everything from selecting the authors, through lighting and costumes, to replacing the lavatory paper. It was here that she introduced American audiences to writers such as Edward Albee and Athol Fugard. She also rewrote fairy tales in play form, which were published in a two-volume collection called Plays for Children by the publisher Samuel French, and she taught playwriting at the University of Iowa. <\/p>\n![\"American](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/a12300fd-05a5-4607-86a4-77a9c698cc87.jpg\")
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