Barbara Ferris obit

Barbara Ferris obituary

Actor who began her career in ‘dolly bird’ roles and became the star of plays by Edward Bond and David Hare 

She was not on the list.

It was once said of the actor Barbara Ferris, who has died aged 88, that she was the only one of Joan Littlewood’s girls at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in London, who started out working-class and ended up middle-class.

Her father had a milk round in Soho after the second world war. Barbara progressed from training at the Italia Conti stage school, to fashion modelling and dancing – in Cole Porter’s Can-Can and The Pajama Game, Bob Fosse’s first show as a choreographer – at the London Coliseum in 1954-55, to important roles in plays by Edward Bond and David Hare at the Royal Court. In 1966, she was in a starring role opposite Donald Sinden in Terence Frisby’s West End long-runner There’s a Girl in My Soup (her role in the subsequent film was taken by Goldie Hawn).

Along the way, she transformed herself from a blond, beehive hair-styled cockney “dolly bird” to an actor of real emotional and technical command, notably in John Boorman’s first feature film, Catch Us If You Can (1965) with the Dave Clark Five, a much-underrated movie, and in Interlude (1968), Kevin Billington’s remake of a US Douglas Sirk film, in which, as an arts reporter, she conducted a disruptive affair with a married maestro played by Oskar Werner.

The social mobility tag was applied when she married, in 1960, the film director and producer, John Quested, while appearing in cabaret at Winston’s Club, Mayfair. Her honeymoon was just one night in the Dorchester hotel, as she was about to make her professional stage debut with Littlewood in Stephen Lewis’s Sparrers Can’t Sing. The show transferred to the West End. She was up and running.

By the early 90s, Quested was both the owner and chairman of Goldcrest Films. Ferris’s career did not dry up exactly, but she retired by choice, to raise the couple’s family, and travel extensively with her husband’s work. They had houses in Ireland and Zurich and, in London, a Chelsea apartment.

The second of four children, Barbara was born in London, to Dorothy (nee Roth) and Roy Ferris. While at Italia Conti, she was already working as a teenager in TV commercials and pantomime, supplementing Roy’s income. Her younger sister, Liz, became a springboard diving champion, who won a bronze medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, before going on to be a doctor.

Barbara’s early television work included the groundbreaking pop music show Cool for Cats (1956), alongside Amanda Barrie and Una Stubbs, and a cockney barmaid, Nona Willis, at the Rovers Return in Coronation Street (1961); Nona left the Street after 10 episodes, because she didn’t understand the Lancastrian accents.

There was nothing cosy about her performance as Pam in Bond’s Saved (given under club conditions in 1965 – the Lord Chamberlain had censored it): an unaffectionate mother, glued to the television, of the baby stoned to death in a notorious scene; nor as the effervescent, spirited Moll, defying an “arranged marriage” in the teeming Jacobean comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in 1966. Both plays were at the Royal Court and directed by William Gaskill.

After There’s a Girl in My Soup, in which she managed a sort of beady frivolity, she was one of three liberated female teachers – the others were Anna Massey and Lynn Redgrave – in Hare’s first major success, Slag (1971); Mrs Elvsted in John Osborne’s adaptation of Hedda Gabler (with Jill Bennett and Brian Cox); and the hilarious spirit of a “new broom” in a chaotic pre-internet library in Michael Frayn’s Alphabetical Order (1975), playing opposite Billie Whitelaw’s humane confusion as a much-loved resident librarian.

The director of the Frayn play, Michael Rudman, took her into his Lyttelton-based National Theatre company for revivals of Somerset Maugham and JB Priestley before she returned to the West End as the boozy actor sister of Penelope Keith in Stanley Price’s Moving (1981); and as a sexually treacherous sister in Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings (1982) – having sex with said sister’s obtuse novelist husband (Nigel Havers) under a Christmas tree laden with presents and thereby setting off a gift-wrapped, loudly drumming teddy bear.

Her last major London appearances were as Mavis, a dance teacher, in Richard Harris’s suburban Chorus Line-type hit, Stepping Out (1984), in which she skilfully projected an uneasy blend of personal insecurity and dull professional competence, and in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound at the Greenwich Theatre in 1991, a rueful family comedy.

She was twice married to Richard Briers on screen: as a vicar’s wife in 18 episodes of the 1985 television sitcom All in Good Faith, and as Enid Washbrook in Michael Winner’s so-so movie based on Ayckbourn’s wonderful am-dram comedy, A Chorus of Disapproval (1989), featuring before-they-were-movie-stars super-suave Jeremy Irons and a sweaty, obsessive Anthony Hopkins.

Her last film, which she did because her old friend from Littlewood days, Victor Spinetti, was in it, was Peter Medak’s The Krays (1990). And she dabbled in fringe theatre, producing and financing two glorious little compilation shows at the King’s Head in Islington in 2002: Call Me Merman and Dorothy Fields Forever, paying tribute to the great Ethel and the unjustly forgotten lyricist Dorothy, both magically recreated by her friend Angela Richards.

Ferris, who loved playing golf, is survived by her husband and their children, Nicholas, Christopher and Catherine.

Actress

Gary Kemp and Martin Kemp in The Krays (1990)

The Krays

6.6

Mrs. Lawson

1990

 

Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Irons, Patsy Kensit, Richard Briers, Barbara Ferris, Gareth Hunt, Lionel Jeffries, Pete Lee-Wilson, and Alexandra Pigg in A Chorus of Disapproval (1989)

A Chorus of Disapproval

5.5

Enid Washbrook

1989

 

All in Good Faith (1985)

All in Good Faith

5.7

TV Series

Emma Lambe

1985–1987

12 episodes

 

Mr & Mrs Edgehill (1985)

BBC2 Playhouse

6.8

TV Series

Elizabeth

1981

3 episodes

 

Alan Dobie in The ITV Play (1968)

The ITV Play

TV Series

Ethel Bartlett

1980

1 episode

 

Bryan Marshall in Murder at the Wedding (1979)

Murder at the Wedding

7.6

TV Mini Series

Anne Russell

1979

4 episodes

 

Oranges and Lemons (1973)

Oranges and Lemons

TV Series

June

1973

1 episode

 

Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Paul Scofield, and Anna Calder-Marshall in ITV Saturday Night Theatre (1969)

ITV Saturday Night Theatre

6.0

TV Series

Anne

1973

1 episode

 

Play for Today (1970)

Play for Today

7.8

TV Series

Wife

1973

1 episode

 

Conjugal Rights (1973)

Conjugal Rights

TV Mini Series

Jenny

1973

3 episodes

 

The Strauss Family (1972)

The Strauss Family

7.9

TV Mini Series

Emilie Trampusch

1972

5 episodes

 

A Nice Girl Like Me (1969)

A Nice Girl Like Me

5.7

Candida

1969

 

Oskar Werner in Interlude (1968)

Interlude

6.4

Sally

1968

 

Roy Kinnear in A Slight Case of... (1965)

A Slight Case of...

6.8

TV Series

1965

1 episode

 

Dave Clark and Barbara Ferris in Having a Wild Weekend (1965)

Having a Wild Weekend

5.6

Dinah

1965

 

Herbert Lom in The Human Jungle (1963)

The Human Jungle

7.9

TV Series

Wendy

1964

1 episode

 

Oliver Reed and Jane Merrow in The Girl-Getters (1964)

The Girl-Getters

6.6

Suzy

1964

 

Children of the Damned (1964)

Children of the Damned

6.2

Susan Eliot

1964

 

Bitter Harvest (1963)

Bitter Harvest

6.2

Violet

1963

 

Nigel Patrick in Zero One (1962)

Zero One

8.6

TV Series

Dora

1963

1 episode

 

A Place to Go (1963)

A Place to Go

6.5

Betsy

1963

 

Sparrows Can't Sing (1963)

Sparrows Can't Sing

6.2

Nellie

1963

 

Laurence Olivier, Sarah Miles, and Simone Signoret in Term of Trial (1962)

Term of Trial

7.1

Joan Taylor

1962

 

The Cheaters (1960)

The Cheaters

7.3

TV Series

Gail

1962

1 episode

 

Richard Briers in Brothers in Law (1962)

Brothers in Law

TV Series

Mandy McLeod

1962

1 episode

 

A Pair of Briefs (1962)

A Pair of Briefs

6.0

Gloria Lockwood

1962

 

Peter Adamson, Jean Alexander, Johnny Briggs, Margot Bryant, and Doris Speed in Coronation Street (1960)

Coronation Street

5.6

TV Series

Nona Willis

1961

10 episodes

 

Bob Dylan, David Warner, Ursula Howells, Reg Lye, and Maureen Pryor in The Madhouse on Castle Street (1963)

BBC Sunday-Night Play

8.5

TV Series

The Bombsheits

1960

1 episode

 

ITV Television Playhouse (1955)

ITV Television Playhouse

8.1

TV Series

Paula

1960

1 episode

 

Russ Tamblyn in Tom Thumb (1958)

Tom Thumb

6.4

Thumbelina (uncredited)

1958

 

Rush Hour

TV Series

1958

1 episode

 

Five Guineas a Week

Short

Dancer

1956

 

Soundtrack

Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Irons, Patsy Kensit, Richard Briers, Barbara Ferris, Gareth Hunt, Lionel Jeffries, Pete Lee-Wilson, and Alexandra Pigg in A Chorus of Disapproval (1989)

A Chorus of Disapproval

5.5

performer: "Fill Every Glass", "O Polly", "Youth's the Season" (uncredited)

1989

 

Self

Michael Aspel in This Is Your Life (1955)

This Is Your Life

6.5

TV Series

Self

1985

1 episode

 

John Betjeman in Contrasts (1967)

Contrasts

TV Series

Self

1968

1 episode

 

Johnny Carson in The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

8.5

TV Series

Self - Guest

1968

1 episode

 

Variety Club of Great Britain Awards for 1966

TV Special

Self - Most Promising Artist

1967

 

Helen Atkinson Wood, Nell Campbell, Simon Hickson, Brian Travers, and Trevor Neal in Juke Box Jury (1959)

Juke Box Jury

7.6

TV Series

Self - Panellist

1965

1 episode