motion-picture actress whose classic beauty and screen persona of elegance, poise, and maternal virtue made her one of the most popular and admired Hollywood stars of the World War II era.

Garson often claimed to have been born in County Down, Ireland, where her grandparents lived and which she happily visited as a child, but she was, in fact, born and raised in London. Although she would have liked to have studied acting, Garson won a scholarship to the University of London and her practical-minded family encouraged her to pursue a teaching career. After graduating with honours, Garson worked briefly for Encyclopædia Britannica and a London advertising firm but continually tried to get her foot into a backstage door. In 1932 she made her debut with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, playing a middle-aged schoolteacher in Elmer Rice (Rice, Elmer)'s Street Scene. Later that year she toured in George Bernard Shaw (Shaw, George Bernard)'s Too True to Be Good, billing herself as Greer (a maternal family name) for the first time. Garson soon established herself as a popular ingenue and leading lady in London's West End. In 1938 Louis B. Mayer (Mayer, Louis B), head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), caught her performance in Old Music and signed her to a contract with his studio.

Following the war Garson's career faltered. The public rejected her attempts to reforge her image to that of a more fun-loving, less noble heroine in such films as Adventure (1946) and Julia Misbehaves (1948). During the 1950s she appeared in several unexceptional films and television dramas and starred on Broadway as Auntie Mame. Her remarkably convincing portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt (Roosevelt, Eleanor) in Sunrise at Campobello (1960) was widely praised and earned her a seventh Oscar nomination, but Garson performed only occasionally thereafter, devoting most of her time to philanthropic causes, including the endowment of scholarships for theatre students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the construction of a campus theatre.