Born in London, daughter of the painter Sydney Earnshaw Greenwood, she was trained at Rada and became one of the most enchanting stage, screen and TV actresses of her time. There were the quizzical eyes, the neat face with its provocative nose and the slight, firm body which looked good in off-the-shoulder dresses in such period movies as the elegant Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), the dire The Bad Lord Byron (1949) and Tony Richardson's Oscar-winning Tom Jones (1963). Above all, there was that voice - husky, seductive, felinely purring.
Leslie Howard gave Greenwood her first significant film role in The Gentle Sex (1943), his Second World War, morale-boosting tribute to the gutsy ATS girls. Her first major performance, however, was in The October Man (1947), produced and written by Eric Ambler, where she protects amnesiac John Mills when he's framed for murder.
Immediately after, she became a vital presence in three classic Ealing comedies that guarantee her immortality, playing provocative, teasing, manipulative women: the Scots girl mocking resident Brit Basil Radford in Alexander Mackendrick's Whisky Galore! (1949), the minx blackmailing Dennis Price in Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and above all the cool, intelligent realist standing between her rich, industrialist father and the idealistic inventor Alec Guinness in Mackendrick's The Man in the White Suit (1951).
She worked again with Hamer and Guinness as a kindly aristocrat in Father Brown (1954) and went to Hollywood to play the 18th-century femme fatale in Fritz Lang's Moonfleet (1955), cast, according to the producer John Houseman, to give the movie a little style. She was also rather good as a diva in the drama of New York theatrical life, Stage Struck (1958), a remake of the 1933 Katharine Hepburn picture Morning Glory. But after Ealing, she only appeared in two movies of the first rank - as an utterly beguiling Gwendolen in Anthony Asquith's perfectly cast The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) and as one of the English women who falls victim to the French visitor Gérard Philipe in René Clément's downbeat, rarely revived tragicomedy of Anglo-French manners, Knave of Hearts (aka Monsieur Ripois, 1954).
Her best work thereafter was in the theatre. She was appearing at the Oxford Playhouse as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in 1960 when she fell in love with André Morell, who was playing Judge Brack. They eloped to marry in the West Indies. She was 39, he was 51, it was the first marriage for both, and they were together until his death in 1978. They had a son, the actor Jason Morell. Her final film, Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit, opened in 1987; she died the same year.
Posthumous fame In a 1995 Empire poll she was voted 63rd sexiest star in film history.
Two Greenwood firsts She starred in Ealing's first colour movie, Saraband for Dead Lovers, and in Fritz Lang's first widescreen film.
Essential DVDS Whisky Galore!, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, The Importance of Being Earnest, The October Man