julian_craster

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O'Shea [married name Rollo], Teresa Mary [Tessie] (1913-1995), singer
and actress, was born on 13 March 1913 at 61 Plantagenet Street, Cardiff,
the daughter of James Peter O'Shea, a labourer at a gasworks, and his wife,
Nellie, nee Carr. Her father was Irish, her mother Lancastrian; she
inherited her mother's accent. A natural performer, she won a talent contest
at the age of eight, tying for first place with an entire Welsh choir. A
subsequent appearance in a charity show brought her to the attention of the
Stoll organization, and at the legal minimum age of twelve she was appearing
professionally at the Bristol Hippodrome. Within months she was appearing at
a showcase venue, the Chiswick Empire. Her early act owed a great deal to
the comedian Lily Morris, but O'Shea rapidly developed a voice of both power
and sweetness and a unique rapport with her audience. She had a large body,
weighing 17 stone at the peak of her career, and her signature tune in the
1940s gave her her best known sobriquet, Two Ton Tessie, but while her songs
alluded to her lack of sexual success-'Nobody Loves a Fat Girl when she's
Forty', 'I fell in love with an airman but I'm nobody's sweetheart
now'-their tone was one of self-celebration, reinforced by high kicks and a
brisk banjolele accompaniment.

In 1934 O'Shea moved to the Moss Empires circuit and throughout the decade
she consistently topped variety bills throughout Britain, notably in
Blackpool where her Lancashire roots made her a summer season favourite.
During the Second World War she maintained this dominance on several fronts:
as one of the most popular artistes with the Entertainments National Service
Association, as a performer at royal private parties, and as a guest on the
radio show Happidrome. On 31 July 1940 she married David Halsel Rollo (b.
1916/17), schoolmaster, son of David Rollo, a hotel manager in Blackpool. He
was three years her junior, and at the time of their marriage was a second
lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. There were no children of the marriage,
which ended in divorce in 1950. In 1944 she and Max Miller jointly topped
the bill at the Palladium; the contrast of their comic styles served to
underline their high status in the profession. O'Shea appeared at the first
royal variety performance of the peace in 1946; she closed the first half,
descending like a deus ex machina in a glittering dress and singing 'Money
is the Root of All Evil' as she flung banknotes into the audience. This
surrealist note was echoed in several of her songs, such as the yodelling
routine 'U are a Liarty', and the high-speed 'I met him by the withered
weeping willows'.

As the end of the war approached O'Shea's film career began with The Way
Ahead in 1944. In 1946 she had a seemingly career-changing opportunity with
London Town, in which she played a pearly queen. However, the British film
industry failed to find her a suitable follow-up role: John E. Blakeley cast
her in two northern comedies, opposite Sandy Powell in Holidays with Pay and
Frank Randle in Somewhere in Politics, but neither achieved the wider
exposure the performers deserved. It was in the 1949 film The Blue Lamp that
the real power and charm of O'Shea was to be seen. She had a cameo role as
herself in a murder story played across London nightlife-cinemas, dog
tracks, and a variety theatre. 'Tessie O'Shea ... she's good', remarked one
of the protagonists, and the life-loving vigour with which she attacked her
saucy but innocuous song contrasted with the callousness of the young armed
robbers. The effectiveness of this juxtaposition was grounded in nostalgia:
as the materialism of the 1950s, here symbolized by the brutal murder of a
young policeman, had begun to erode the values that had orchestrated the
welfare state, so live variety shows had largely given way to television.
The warmth of O'Shea's performance, perhaps even more effectively than the
idealized figure of the old-time bobby on the beat, incarnated an older
England.

This element of outdatedness accounted, perhaps, for the slump in O'Shea's
career that followed. In 1963, however, Noel Coward cast her in his Broadway
musical The Girl who Came to Supper, in a role that closely resembled her
part as a cockney mother in London Town. This time, however, she won a Tony
award and went on to appear as a guest on the Ed Sullivan show (with the
Beatles) and in cabaret. She received a further Oscar nomination for her
role in The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming in 1966, and an
Emmy award for a television performance in Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. She
returned to Blackpool to play a summer season with Ken Dodd in 1970, and she
launched her own series on British television, As Good Cooks Go. O'Shea's
career, however, was now centred on America, and in 1971 she made one of her
best remembered film appearances in the Disney fantasy Bedknobs and
Broomsticks. Two years later she starred in London Revue at the Sands Hotel
in Las Vegas, Nevada, and she continued to make occasional appearances in
Britain. She retired to Leesburg, Florida, where she died on 21 April 1995.

Frances Gray

julian_craster

The writer of this piece clearly has not seen LONDON TOWN, as Tessie's role is not as described...