Sheila Sim, Actress and Widow of Richard Attenborough, Dies at 93

She starred in 'A Canterbury Tale' and, with her husband, in the original stage production of Agatha Christie’s 'The Mousetrap.'

Sheila Sim, the widow of British cinema legend Richard Attenborough who starred with him in films and in the original stage production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, has died. She was 93.

Her death on Tuesday was announced that day after a performance of The Mousetrap in Nottingham’s Theatre Royal. She starred opposite her husband as Mollie Ralston, the proprietor of Monkswell Manor, in the world premiere of the classic whodunit there in October 1952, and they moved with the production to the West End.

Sim had been living since 2013 in London’s Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors, after having been diagnosed with dementia.

She and Attenborough were married from January 1945 until his death in August 2014 at age 90. “A bomb went off while me and Sheila were exchanging our wedding vows, you know,” Attenborough once said of his World War II wedding. “It was sort of routine.”

The actors also worked together in Dancing With Crime (1947), The Outsider (1948) and The Magic Box (1951).

A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Lady Attenborough made her movie debut in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) and later appeared in Great Day (1945), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and The Night My Number Came Up (1955).

Survivors include her son, theater director Michael Attenborough. Her daughter Jane and granddaughter Lucy lost their lives in the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004 and killed about 230,000 people.