Now, English Heritage has revealed that the pioneering feminist director is set to get a prestigious blue plaque.
It’s not yet known which of her former homes will be marked out, but Craigie and Foot lived for many decades in Hampstead.
It was while living in Pilgrim’s Lane that he won the Labour leadership and lost the 1983 general election against Margaret Thatcher.
But many felt Craigie’s early career was overshadowed by her husband’s public profile.
In the 1940s, while living in Holly Berry Lane, Hampstead, she directed a string of political documentaries including on child refugees, equal pay for women, and the working conditions of miners.
She met Foot while making her film The Way We Live about the wartime bombing and rebuilding of his home town of Plymouth.
It was 1945 and he was about to become the Labour MP for Devonport in Clement Atlee’s trailblazing government.
Craigie was married at the time to film director Jeffrey Dell, and already had a daughter Julie from her first marriage.
Craigie was born in Fulham in 1914 to a Russian mother and Scottish father. She left school at 18 to work as a journalist and by 1937 had become an actor, playing a small role in the circus drama Make-Up.
But as she became more politicised she decided to go into film making, which led to a British Council job offer as a documentary scriptwriter.
While also volunteering as a fire warden during the war, she wrote the feature length screenplay to The Flemish Farm (1943), which was directed by husband Jeffrey Dell.
Deciding to direct a film herself, she scripted, produced and directed the half-hour documentary, Out of Chaos (1944) about the artists Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore and Paul Nash.
She and Foot finally married in 1949 and the couple moved into their home in Hampstead in the 1960s.
By that time, after directing five films and writing several others including co-writing the hit film Trouble in Store starring Norman Wisdom, Craigie had retired from the film business reportedly frustrated by its attitudes towards women.
She made one more film – Two Hours From London – about the war in the former Yugoslavia.
She died in the Royal Free Hospital at the age of 88 and Foot continued to live in Hampstead until his death in 2010.
He always maintained that Craigie was the love of his life.
