I am always surprised that the audience thinks me funny at all', Rutherford wrote in her autobiography. As her celebrated 'spaniel jowls' and bulky frame made the part of a romantic heroine out of the question, she soon established her name in comedy, appearing in many of the most successful British plays and films. Rutherford, a talented pianist who first found work as a piano teacher and a teacher of elocution, went into acting relatively late in life, making her stage debut in 1925, at age 33, in the Old Vic. In her autobiography, Rutherford called her Aunt Bessie her 'adoptive mother and one of the saints of the world'. When her aunt died, she left a legacy which allowed Rutherford to secure entry to the Old Vic School. After she left school, her aunt paid for her to have private acting lessons. While she was there, she developed an interest in the theatre and performed in amateur dramatics. Margaret Rutherford was educated at Wimbledon High School (where a theatre space, the Rutherford Centre, is now named after her) and, from the age of about 13, at Raven's Croft School, a boarding school in Sutton Avenue, Seaford. Her parents' mental afflictions gave rise to a fear that she might succumb to similar maladies, a fear which haunted her for the rest of her life, and she suffered intermittent bouts of depression and anxiety. Young Margaret had been told that her father died of a broken heart soon afterwards, so when she was 12 years old she was shocked to learn that her father had actually been readmitted to Broadmoor Hospital in 1903, where he remained under care until his death on 4 August 1921. Hoping to start a new life far from the scene of their recent troubles, the Rutherfords emigrated to Madras, India, but Margaret was returned to Britain when she was three years old to live with her aunt Bessie Nicholson in Wimbledon, south London, after her pregnant mother hanged herself from a tree. Margaret's uncle, Sir John Benn, 1st Baronet, was a politician, and her first cousin once removed was the Labour politician Tony Benn. Margaret Taylor Rutherford, the only child of William and Florence, was born in 1892 in Balham, South London. Seven years later, on 26 July 1890, he was discharged from Broadmoor and reunited with his wife. ДЇollowing the inquest, William Benn was certified insane and removed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Released to travel under his family's supervision, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational Church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamber pot, before slashing his own throat with a pocket knife at an inn in Matlock, Derbyshire on 4 March 1883. One month after the marriage, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum. Her father, journalist and poet William Rutherford Benn, married Florence Nicholson on 16 December 1882 in Wandsworth, south London. Rutherford's early life was overshadowed by tragedies involving both of her parents.

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