Ann Beach obituary | Television

Ann Beach obituary

Not many performers have appeared in The Archers on radio, starred opposite Ginger Rogers in a Drury Lane musical, sung in an award-winning children’s choir at the Llangollen Eisteddfod and played Hugh Grant’s mum. But Ann Beach, a resourceful and lovable character actor, who has died aged 78, did all of these things, and more.

Her face may have been most familiar in the mid-1980s television sitcom Fresh Fields, written by John Chapman and starring Julia McKenzie and Anton Rodgers as a well-off married couple in Barnes, London, learning to cope with empty-nest syndrome; Beach was their nosy neighbour, Sonia Barrett, guaranteed to drop in at tricky moments saying the wrong thing, though she did not overstay her welcome when the series crossed the channel as French Fields in 1991.

But the theatrical credentials of this bright-eyed, full-voiced pocket dynamo (just five feet tall) were established in the 1960s when she was a stalwart of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East, appearing in the premieres of Lionel Bart’s Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (as one of the sex workers singing a lewd G’night Dearie with Carmel Cryan), Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Oh! What a Lovely War; and in the West End, as orange-eating Barbara with Albert Finney in Billy Liar (1960) at the Cambridge.

Ann’s grandfather, Albert Beach, was the mayor of Wolverhampton, where she was born to Claude Beach, a grocer, and his wife, Rebecca (nee Van Startup). The family moved to Cardiff and opened an ice-cream parlour. In 1947, Ann was a member of the renowned Snowflakes children’s choir which won the inaugural Llangollen Eisteddfod. As she went on to Cardiff high school for girls she received much encouragement from Rae Jenkins, principal conductor of the BBC Welsh Orchestra, who believed she could become an opera singer.

Instead, she decided on drama and won a scholarship to Rada, departing for London and lodgings in Shepherds Hill, Highgate, aged only 16. She made her professional debut in 1957 at Streatham Hill in a touring production of Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso starring Frankie Howerd (she was a pert maid in a 1966 movie of the same play, with Alec Guinness and Gina Lollobrigida), before joining Littlewood at Stratford, where she also appeared in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan and Ben Jonson’s city comedy Every Man in His Humour; the latter, with a cast including Victor Spinetti, Roy Kinnear and Brian Murphy, caused a sensation at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris in 1960.

For a few years she shuttled between Theatre Workshop and the Royal Court, mixing the creative chaos of the first with the high-minded rigour of the second, missing the working tempo in each place when at the other. At the Court, she was in Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers with Colin Blakely and James Booth and, in 1962, John Osborne’s Under Plain Cover, directed by Jonathan Miller, returning to Stratford for Oh! What a Lovely War in 1963 and then back to the Court as the fed-up and pregnant secretary/mistress of Nicol Williamson’s coruscating, loathsome divorce lawyer Bill Maitland in Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence (1964), directed by Anthony Page.

One of her first TV roles was as part of the feisty all-female workforce in The Rag Trade (1961), alongside her fellow Littlewood alumnae Barbara Windsor and Toni Palmer, marshalled by Miriam Karlin’s fag-puffing shop steward (“Everybody out!”) and Sheila Hancock’s slow-witted shop treasurer. She compiled an impressive television CV, through Mrs Sowerberry in the 1982 Oliver Twist with George C Scott as Fagin, Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders and, most recently, the medical drama series Monroe. Notting Hill (1999), in which she played the mother of William (Hugh Grant), was one of her few major feature films.

She loved radio, finding the team spirit there more redolent of her early days in rep, and played countless roles over the years, including a brief tenure as Lilian Bellamy’s tenant Joyce Walters in The Archers in 2012. As theatre work dried up, she took to voice-coaching and teaching drama at Mountview theatre school.

But her piano-playing party piece – the Minute Waltz, complete with hectic lyrics – would remind friends and colleagues how underused she was, perhaps, in musical theatre. Her only West End “glamour” shows were Mame with Ginger Rogers and Margaret Courtenay at Drury Lane in 1969 (as another pregnant secretary, she had a hilarious comic number, Gooch’s Song, with crazy high notes) and as Letitia Primrose, another Broadway zany (originally played by Imogene Coca), in On the Twentieth Century at Her Majesty’s in 1980 with Keith Michell and Julia McKenzie.

Beach married the French-Canadian television producer Francis Coleman in 1966. He predeceased her in 2008, as did their first daughter, the actor Charlotte Coleman, in 2001; she is survived by her second daughter, Lisa Coleman, also an actor, and her younger sister, Hazel.

Ann Beach, actor, born 7 June 1938; died 9 March 2017

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