I recently watched The Prisoner of Zenda and loved it. What a great cast. But as I looked up one of the stars of the film I was pleasantly surprised about her story of how she gave up acting at the peak of her career for something more noble. Forget The Oscar, she was awarded the American Medal of Freedom and the Legion of Honour from France.

Here is an excerpt of Madeleine Carroll's Wikipedia page that describes part of what she did...

After her only sister Marguerite was killed in World War II's London Blitz, Carroll made a radical shift from acting to working in field hospitals as a Red Cross nurse. Having become a naturalized US citizen in 1943, she served at the American Army Air Force's 61st Station Hospital in Foggia, Italy in 1944, where wounded airmen flying out of area air bases were hospitalized.

During the war, Carroll also donated her chateau outside Paris to more than 150 orphans, arranging for groups of young people in California to knit clothing for them. In an RKO-Pathe News bulletin she was filmed at the chateau with children and staff wearing the donated clothes thanking those who contributed. She was awarded the Légion d'honneur for her efforts by France. Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower remarked in private that he was most impressed with Carroll and Herbert Marshall (who worked with military amputees) of all the movie stars he met in Europe during the war.[17]

After the war, Carroll stayed in Europe where she conducted a radio program fostering French-American friendship and helped in the rehabilitation of concentration camp victims, during which she met her future third husband, French producer Henri Lavorel. In late 1946, she went briefly to Switzerland to film a British soap opera, High Fury (aka White Cradle Inn).[18]

Upon her return to Paris, she and Lavorel formed a production company and made several two-reel documentaries to "promote better understanding among the peoples of the world"; one, "Children's Republic", was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Filmed in a small orphanage in the town of Sèvres, just southwest of Paris, it focused attention on the devastation of children's lives in Europe caused by war. Widely shown in Canada, it became a prime source of funds for the manufacture of artificial limbs for wounded children.

In 1947, Carroll returned to the US together with Lavorel. Their intention was for her to resume her acting career, which would fund their production company, but they soon separated. Appearing in three more films until 1949 and debuting on Broadway in 1948, Carroll then mostly retired from acting, although she would occasionally show up on television and radio until the mid-1960s.