Beryl Reid, who has died, aged 76, was a much loved character actress who comparatively late in life brought the techniques and attack of a stand-up comic to a wide variety of straight plays. These ranged from Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane to Romeo and Juliet, in which she played the nurse in the 1974 National Theatre production. Her career spanned music hall and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and took her into films and television.
The play that made her name as an actress willing to take on controversial parts was The Killing of Sister George, about lesbian power-play amongst the women of a radio soap opera. She had already reached a wide public in the 1950s on BBC radio’s Educating Archie comedy series as Monica, the dreadful mealy-mouthed schoolgirl (“She’s my best friend, and I hate her!”) and Marlene, the streetwise Brummie proto-teenager.
Born in Hereford, she first announced she was going on the stage at the age of four, a year after she started to learn dancing. In Manchester she went to the “progressive” Lady Barne House School, Withington, but got herself in so many scrapes that she was moved to the strict Levenshulme Girls’ School. Her father, an estate agent, got her a “secure” job at Kendal Milne’s, Manchester’s answer to Harrods, where she broke things in the china department but excelled at demonstrations.
She won a concert party audition playing a character she had created called Ethel, a hotel maid collecting guests’ shoes from outside their rooms and giving impressions of their owners. This gave her a season at Bridlington at £2 a week in 1936.
When war broke out she auditioned for the forces entertainment organisation ENSA, and went on tours with the Dagenham Girl Pipers. Her first big success was in Howard and Wyndhams’ Half Past Eight Show, for which she wrote 472 sketches in one season.
Her reputation grew with her constant exposure on the BBC’s Variety Bandbox and Workers’ Playtime radio shows, through which she met her first husband, the producer Bill Worsley. She introduced the then unnamed Monica character at the Playhouse Theatre at Charing Cross, where the bandleader Henry Hall saw her and took her on to Henry Hall’s Guest Night.
She toured with the comedian Max Wall for a year and with the man who became her second husband – also to be divorced – Derek Franklin, a musician in the Hedley Ward Trio.
At the tiny Watergate Theatre in the Strand, she realised that she could create characters by studying their feet, their shoes and their walk. Despite solo variety success, including a record year’s run at the Palladium, she wanted to work with other people. So it was in 1965 that she accepted the star part in The Killing of Sister George from impresario Michael Codron. Its lesbian motif was thought so depraved on its preliminary provincial tour that at Hull the shopkeepers refused to serve the cast.
Once in London, however, both the play and Reid’s second career as an actress took off. She transferred the role to New York and won a Tony award, made the Robert Aldrich-directed film of the play with Susannah York and Coral Browne and played in the stage and film version of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. Her other films include The Belles of St Trinians, Star, and No Sex Please, We’re British.
On television she was memorable in the BBC adaptation of John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People. In it she played Connie Sachs, onetime secret service head of research, and one of George Smiley’s ex-lovers, whose memories he coolly taps in the course of his search for a Russian mole. She was also the grandmother in Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 .
Beryl Reid, who was given the OBE in 1986, had no children by either of her marriages. Her autobiography So Much Love was published in 1984.
Beryl Reid, actress, born June 17, 1920; died October 13, 1996.
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