The Nanny | 1965
- Locations |
- London;
- Hertfordshire
- DIRECTOR |
- Seth Holt
Bette Davis, in her post-Baby Jane phase, is the murderous nanny in this Hammer psycho-shocker.
The posh London house, where she acts as a scary Mary Poppins to the kids, is on Chester Terrace alongside Regent’s Park, London NW1.
the elegant and exclusive Nash terraces have proved irresistible to film-makers. Among the other screen characters who live here are: rich girl Fenella (Hayley Mills) in the dated Agatha Christie mystery Endless Night and Deborah Kerr in the 1955 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair. Gertrude Lawrence (Julie Andrews) faces bankruptcy here in Star! (Robert Wise’s ill-fated attempt to recapture the magic of The Sound of Music) and blackmailer Dennis Price calls on a victim at the opening of The Naked Truth.
The SS marches though the terrace’s gate in Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s chilling ‘documentary’ of life in Britain under Nazi rule, It Happened Here. The Ministry’s ‘mobile HQ’ (a double-decker London bus) trundles past the terraces in The Avengers – and watch Robert Redford driving to the CIA HQ in Tony Scott’s Spy Game. You’ll recognise the terraces masquerading as Washington DC. In 2005, the terrace became home to theatrical entrepreneur Laura Henderson (Judi Dench) in Stephen Frears’ Mrs Henderson Presents.
You can see the clinic, where one of her little charges is sent for psychiatric assessment, up in Hertfordshire.
It is in fact Wall Hall, until recently the University of Hertfordshire now private housing, north of Aldenham, between Watford and Radlett, which was also used as the children’s hospital in the 1957 Anna Neagle tearjerker No Time For Tears, as well as the mansion of Roger Morton (George Cole) in Roy Ward Baker's 1970 The Vampire Lovers (the film of J Sheridan Le Fanu’s Gothic novel Carmilla).
