Film and television actress Jean Kent, one of Britain’s biggest stars in the 1940s and 1950s, has died.

She was injured in a fall at her home in Westhorpe, Suffolk, and died at the West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds at 03:40 GMT.

Her death was announced by a close family friend, author and former film critic Michael Thornton.

Her last public appearance was in 2011 when she was honoured by the British Film Institute on her 90th birthday.

Mr Thornton said: “I knew Jean for more than 50 years. She was a feisty, funny, outspoken character who never took herself too seriously.

“She knew what it meant to be a star and regarded it as her job to live up to that position and never to disappoint the public.”

Kent’s career included regular appearances in Gainsborough melodramas, which were popular with large numbers of newly-independent women following the outbreak of the Second World War.

She made 45 films and during her career starred alongside Marilyn Monroe, Michael Redgrave and Laurence Olivier.

‘Bodice-ripping melodramas’Born in Brixton, south London on 29 June, 1921, she was the only child of variety performers Norman Field and Nina Norre. As a 13-year-old she performed at the Windmill Theatre in London’s West End.

She had met her husband Josef Ramart on the set of Caravan and they married four months later in 1946, with Stuart Granger as best man.

They bought a farm near Sudbury, Suffolk in the 1950s and stayed there for 20 years until they moved to Westhorpe. Her husband died in 1989.

Kent also had a television career, which started in the mid-1930s in a musical called The Ship In The Bay which was broadcast live.

Her post-war television appearances included roles in Up Pompeii!, Crossroads and Lovejoy.

Below – Link to a Television clip at the time of ber 90th Birthday :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSqh31eDEuU&feature=player_detailpage

Mr Thornton added: “Because she became one of the most famous stars of the Gainsborough era, with its bodice-ripping melodramas, she was underrated as an actress. But she was a great actress.”

Speaking on her 90th birthday she told the BBC she was still available for work.

“Oh yes, I’d work like a shot, as long as I didn’t have to walk,” she said.

“A nice sitting-down part would be fine.”

Mrs. Miller succumbed to injuries suffered in a fall a few months ago in Napa, where she had a home. She was 79.

As the only surviving child of Walt and Lillian Disney, Mrs. Miller was the president of the Walt Disney Family Foundation and co-founder, with her son, Walter Elias Disney Miller, of the Walt Disney Family Museum. Last year more than 100,000 people visited the museum, which is on track to hit 150,000 in 2013.

She read her father’s original dedication fifty years later to the day at the birthday celebrations of Disneyland on July 17, 2005 and organised the development of The Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. The museum opened in October, 2009.

Diane Disney Miller wrote the foreword to the book Walt Before Mickey by Timothy Susanin. The book covers the early years of Walt Disney’s career.

Animation historian Michael Barrier reports that Miller, in August 2007, sent a fax to a number of executives at the Walt Disney Company, denouncing Neal Gabler’s biography of Walt Disney published in 2006, titled Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, as “a monstrous piece of libelous junk. My parents were not the people he creates in this book, and I cannot understand why all of you who aided and abetted Gabler in writing this book, and who praise it and promote it, can do so without suffering serious qualms.”

“She was totally devoted to the memory of her father. She obviously just worshiped him, and everything she did at the museum was to honour him, and to be sure that people knew the accurate story,” said Nancy Bechtle, who served with Mrs. Miller on the San Francisco Symphony board and recently helped her find a new director for the museum.

A resident of the Bay Area since the mid-1980s, Mrs. Miller was a benefactor to the Symphony and Napa’s “Music in the Vineyards”.

Diane Marie Disney was born Dec. 18, 1933, an event that caused the Los Angeles Times to proclaim “Mickey Mouse has a daughter.” She was educated at the University of Southern California, where she met Ron Miller, a member of the football team, on a blind date after a Cal-USC game.

She is survived by her husband; children Christopher Miller, Joanna Miller, Tamara Diane Miller, Jennifer Miller-Goff, Walter Elias Disney Miller, Ronald Miller and Patrick Miller and grandchildren.

Services will be private. A public celebration at the museum is pending. In lieu of flowers and gifts, donations may be made to the memorial fund that the Walt Disney Family Museum has created in honour of Diane Disney Miller.