 She was employed by the studio of J. Arthur Rank, who called her "the archetypal British beauty" She achieved her greatest level of popularity in British films during the Second World War in escapist melodramas for Gainsborough Studios.The adopted daughter of a Dutch-Belgian stockbroker, André Riese, and a half-French mother, she was educated at private schools in London and Paris, then was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1937.She did not learn that she was adopted until 1949.