Wendy Richard, who died on February 26 aged 65, became one of the best-known faces on British television during more than 20 years as the long-suffering matriarch Pauline Fowler in the BBC soap EastEnders; as a younger woman she had been cast in more glamorous roles, notably as the buxom Miss Brahms in the 1970s situation comedy Are You Being Served?
Last Updated: 5:16PM GMT 26 Feb 2009
Former Eastenders actress Wendy Richard, who played Pauline Fowler, has died of cancer age 65. ; http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1488655367/bctid14168476001 http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=1139053637
For years she endured a bumpy relationship with the tabloid press, which constantly feasted on EastEnders and regarded her as a soap diva; when an ex-boyfriend sold lurid stories about her to the News of the World, Wendy Richard was forced to take out a court injunction against the paper.
In 1994 her third husband, Paul Glorney, sold further information to the same newspaper for a reported £15,000, generating the front page headline “Wendy’s Boozing Sank Our Marriage”. On the studio set, too, life was seldom straightforward for her, and she survived more than one attempt to have Pauline written out.
Wendy Richard’s character had been in EastEnders since the opening episode was broadcast early in 1985; she rejected criticism that Pauline Fowler, manageress of the Albert Square launderette, was miserable, never smiled and dressed like a drab.
A convivial trouper who hugely enjoyed the trappings of soap stardom, Wendy Richard also believed that she was entitled to the same privacy as non-celebrities: in 1995, when she appeared on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, she stopped an inquisitive Sue Lawley four times in the course of the recording after the presenter strayed from the pre-agreed, anodyne agenda; she was annoyed still further when she was not allowed to take her pet Cairn terrier to the mythical island as a luxury.
In February the following year she discovered a lump in her left breast and was diagnosed with cancer. After surgery and a course of radiotherapy, she was given the all-clear. But in July 2006 she announced that she would be leaving EastEnders at Christmas after nearly 22 years in the show.
Although she was to make her name as an actress, Wendy Richard first came to national attention, in 1962, on a novelty pop song, Come Outside, in which she had an attenuated speaking part (“Get lost... Give over”) duetting with the singer Mike Sarne in the role of an importunate young man on pleasure bent. To everyone’s amazement, including her own, the record shot to the top of the charts, where it remained for 19 weeks, selling well over half a million copies. It was her first real brush with fame, if not with fortune — she was paid a flat fee of just £15, and received not a penny in royalties.
Her first television break came in 1965 in The Newcomers, one of the BBC’s earliest soaps, designed to rival ITV’s Coronation Street for social realism. Wendy Richard played Joyce Harker, the teenage daughter of a London family relocated to a fictitious dormitory town in Suffolk.
After several cameo spots in Dad’s Army, Wendy Richard finally achieved stardom in 1973 when she was cast as the Cockney shop assistant Shirley Brahms in Are You Being Served?, set in an antiquated department store, and initially launched as a 30-minute pilot in the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse series. She soon made her mark as the love interest for the infatuated Mr Lucas (played by Trevor Bannister) and the daughter figure for the monstrous pussy-fancier Mrs Slocombe (Mollie Sugden).
Wendy Richard reappeared as Shirley Brahms in a follow-up series to Are You Being Served?, called Grace and Favour, which ran for two series in 1992 and 1993. The original Are You Being Served? episodes are still shown on television in America, where they have become cult viewing; her Shirley Brahms character is recognised as a gay icon worldwide.
Wendy Richard was born Wendy Emerton on July 20 1943 at Middlesbrough, where her parents were publicans and kept the Corporation Hotel. She was still an infant when they moved from the north-east, first to Bournemouth and then the Isle of Wight, before settling in the West End of London at the Shepherds Tavern in Shepherd Market, then a notorious resort of prostitutes. Among the raffish clientèle were Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Michael Wilding, and the photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones (now the Earl of Snowdon) .
With her parents preoccupied with the business, Wendy was raised by nannies and attended St George’s primary school in Mount Street. But her education was interrupted when the family moved again, to the Valentine Hotel at Gants Hill in Essex. Behind the hotel was a large restaurant where a local drama group staged amateur plays, and it was there that Wendy was bitten by the acting bug. Within a matter of months, however, her parents moved yet again, this time to the Streatham Park Hotel, south London, where, in December 1954, her father committed suicide: it was Wendy, then aged 11, who found him dead on the floor in front of a gas fire.
Because her father had been a Freemason, Wendy was enrolled at the Royal Masonic School for Girls at Rickmansworth, all fees paid, while her mother took a series of jobs as housekeeper to various bachelor publicans. When Wendy left school at 16 in 1959 she took a job as a junior in the fashion department at Fortnum & Mason, where the fashion buyer, a Miss Whiteside, later became the inspiration for the brassy, rainbow-coiffed Mrs Slocombe in Are You Being Served?
After only a few months her retail career was sidetracked when her mother bought a small bed-and-breakfast business opposite St Pancras station, and she went to help run it. The enterprise thrived to the extent that her mother was able to scrape together the money to send her to the Italia Conti stage school, where Wendy learned to act, dance and sing; she supplemented her mother’s income by returning to work part-time at various London department stores, including Selfridges, DH Evans, Dickins & Jones and Fenwick (whence she was fired on her second day after telling a woman customer that a coat she was trying on did not suit her).
She was not yet 17 when, on the strength of a glamour portfolio shot by the fashion photographer Michael Barrington-Martin, she landed her first modelling jobs for women’s magazines.
Her first television engagement dates from 1960, when she appeared with Sammy Davis Jr in Sammy Meets The Girls for ATV; speaking parts quickly followed in Dixon of Dock Green and No Hiding Place, the two top police dramas of the time.
A change of agent led to Wendy Richard’s first television series, Harpers West One (1961-63) for ATV, in which she played the receptionist at a department store — “God, I was dreadful,” she recalled; this was followed by spots in various comedy shows. After a chance meeting in the ATV canteen with the scriptwriter Johnny Speight and the actor Michael Caine, she was cast in The Arthur Haynes Show as Haynes’s daughter; when Haynes himself died not long into the run, Speight shelved the scripts, resurrecting them later (and morphing the socialist father into a Right-wing bigot) as Till Death Us Do Part for the BBC.
A turning point for Wendy Richard came when she appeared in a long-running BBC suburban sitcom, Hugh And I, starring Hugh Lloyd and Terry Scott: a few years later, in 1970, the producer, David Croft, would cast her in Dad’s Army, which he co-created with Jimmy Perry, and, three years later, in Are You Being Served? It was Croft who urged her to change her name from Emerton to Richard “because it was short and neat”.
Her film credits included On The Buses and Gumshoe, the latter starring Albert Finney (both 1971); Bless This House and Carry On Matron (both 1972); and Carry On Girls (1973). Her scene with Frankie Howerd in the Beatles’ film Help! (1965) was omitted from the final cut.
She was appointed MBE in the Millennium honours list of 2000. Among the few revelations contained in her memoirs, published in the same year, were her Conservative political sympathies and her daily habit of relaxing with The Daily Telegraph crossword.
Wendy Richard’s marriage, in 1972, to Len Black, a music publisher, ended in divorce; in 1980 she married Will Thorpe, an advertising director, but that marriage also failed. Her third marriage, in 1990, to Paul Glorney, a carpet fitter, ended in 1994.
Since 1996 she had lived with John Burns, a painter and decorator 20 years her junior. They married last October after her cancer had been diagnosed as terminal.
