Pauline Rumbold was a truly charming product of the turbulent 1940s, the vivid age in which she came to maturity. The daughter of a colourful aristocrat, David Tennant, who founded the Gargoyle Club in Soho, and of the actress Hermione Baddeley, Pauline Rumbold mixed these qualities in a manner effortlessly her own. She moved from repertory theatre to high society with ease, at home in a Soho dive or a stately home.

Born in 1927, a year before her parents actually married, Pauline Laetitia Tennant was described with characteristic accuracy by her flamboyant Uncle Stephen as “a divine child — a combination of nursery greed & Roman Empress beauty”. David Tennant doted on his daughter, but she was kept “tucked away down in Surrey”, her existence kept secret from his own mother, the fearsome Pamela Glenconner.

According to Hermione’s somewhat unreliable memoirs, The Unsinkable Hermione Baddeley, Pamela even attempted to marry her son off to Merrod Guinness and adopt the child.

David and Hermione’s marriage was short-lived. They divorced in 1937, David Tennant marrying Virginia Parsons (later the Marchioness of Bath) the following year.

It was telling that Pauline and her stepmother became firm friends, living together at Teffont Magna, David Tennant’s grey stone gothic pile in Wiltshire. She and Virginia also became lifelong friends.

Pauline quickly followed her mother on to the stage. At 15 she appeard in the pages of Picture Post as “Mr Cochran’s Youngest Lady”. Two years later, at 17, she rose from the chorus line to “her first real West-End chance in the latest Ben Travers farce at the Garrick”, as the same periodical reported of the production of She Follows Me About: “She plays Caroline, a young WAAF officer on leave at the seaside with her friend Benita.” In behaviour calculated to outrage the new vicar, the young women photograph each other nude with his camera, and get his wife “uproariously drunk on neat whisky”.

Pauline Tennant “has all the high spirits, and all the assurance,” it was reported. “I don’t want Pauline to make an overnight success,” said her mother. “If you do that you have to keep it up.” Hermione Baddeley’s advice was taken. She took to the stage for Ensa, singing and dancing, and in 1945 her performance in No Medals earned her the front cover of Theatre World.

Her glamorous good looks and high society provenance made for good copy; few actresses of her age had their own flat in Piccadilly. That year she made her screen debut in Great Day, with Eric Portman and Flora Robson. In 1949 came her role as the young Countess in The Queen of Spades, alongside Anton Walbrook and Edith Evans. Pauline played the younger version of Edith Evans’s character, selling her soul and bitterly regretting the act. The actress also bitterly regretted the decision to dub her voice, thus spoiling what could have been her best film part.

In 1946 she married the handsome anthropologist, Julian Pitt-Rivers, postponing her theatre duties to accompany him to Iraq to act as purser to

King Faisal II. Subsequently the couple moved to Spain, but the marriage ended in 1953. The following year she married Euan Douglas Graham, grandson of the 5th Duke of Montrose, who was to become Principal Clerk of Private Bills in the House of Lords.

This was the longest-lasting of her marriages; the couple adopted a son, Andrew. They divorced in 1970, and Pauline married, finally and most happily, Sir Anthony Rumbold, 10th baronet, and former Ambassador to Austria and Bangkok. On his death in 1983 she had her own name carved on his stone in Stinsford churchyard, with her birthdate, 1927, and she moved to a thatched cottage next to the river Frome, on the outskirts of Dorchester.

Although she had long since left the stage, Pauline did not give up performance. For her houseguests, she could burst into songs first sung for Ensa audiences during the war. Equally, she could recite by heart the dialect Dorset poems of William Barnes. In 1989 she published her translation of Barnes’s collected verse. But she was also a keen and appreciated poet in her own right, praised by Peter Levi and by Isaiah Berlin, who responded to her work, The Ascent, in 1989: “Your poem was exquisite and I loved it, every line and every word of it.”

“You will hardly believe it/ But I felt like Atlanta/ Climbing that tussocky down./ A middle-aged housewife.”

In 1992, she published her collected poems under the title, Loaves and Fishes. Her social life was indefatiable, and included later-generation Bloomsburys such as Henrietta Garnett and Jean Woolf, the travel writer Eric Newby — with whom she discussed their respective experiences of India — and the extravagantly gifted but dissolute artist Michael Wishart, whom she had known since their teenage years at the Gargoyle where Wishart recalled Pauline “as beautiful as it is possible to be — young enough to dance alone, in an irresistible scarlet dress, her blonde tresses flying”.

Most of all, she loved visits to her Uncle Stephen, now living the life of an aesthetic hermit in his house at Wilsford, the Tennants’ family home. Pauline recalled, his great amusement, taking Sir Anthony and their son Andrew to visit, only to be told by Stephen, “I think tea for two is so nice, don’t you?” — and having to leave her family outside.

She was also ferocious and witty letter and postcard-writer. In 1977 she conducted an amusing open correspondence with Auberon Waugh in the pages of Books and Bookmen, taking issue with Waugh’s scathing description of the wartime generation of writers, artists and poets as “frauds and flops”. Her father’s club “provided a meeting-place for most, if not all of these pub-crawlers,” she wrote. The Gargoyle was also her nursery, and being in Pauline’s delightful, if gloriously erratic company, her friends often felt they were back on the dancefloor of that glittering dive high over Soho.

Pauline Rumbold, actress and poet, born on February 6, 1927. She died on December, 6, 2008, aged 81