smudge

The Stage reports the death of Avril Angers at 87.

http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/newsstory.p...gers-dies-at-87

SMUDGE

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

sanndevil

Oh no! What a shame! Very underappreciated and sadly not known to today's generatrion.

julian_craster

Avril Angers
The Times November 11, 2005

April 18, 1918 - November 9, 2005
Forces sweetheart who endured as a versatile stage actress

BEST known as a theatrical trouper — was there no role she could not play on
stage? — Avril Angers had a way of getting audiences to take her to their
hearts. Either as a singer or dancer, dramatic actress or exponent of revue
or musical comedy, Angers was nothing if not versatile.
She mastered the art as a teenage player of being able to project a sense of
fun wherever it was happening — over the wireless, in films, on television
or the stage; and even in old age she could be counted on to play aunts and
mothers with an engaging lightness of touch.

In farces or thrillers, musical comedies or pantomimes, and sometimes as the
foil for the most expert television comics of the day, Angers brought
self-assurance and authority to the stage. What she established in the
theatre was atmosphere: her acting had a way of setting the scene; though
with comics like Fred Emney, Frankie Howerd, Arthur Askey, Benny Hill and
Les Dawson she played remarkably straight.

Not that Angers was at ease only in light comedy. It is true that this was
how she began, but later she could deliver a barbed witticism in revue, or
strike a heartbreaking note in a Noël Coward song, or deliver a monologue
with pathos.

In a classic revival — as Mrs Hardcastle in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to
Conquer, or as Miss Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love — she could sometimes
come into her own.

Often she wrote her own (mainly comic) material, which she used as an
adolescent in pre-war summer shows, and on the lyric stage — especially in
revue, which was in vogue almost throughout her early career. She was often
compared to the most brilliant exponents of the genre, such as the two
Hermiones (Gingold and Baddeley).

What Angers revelled in was the quick-change, sharp-witted, satirical
musical show popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Her parents already worked in
the theatre; hence her education at various schools in England and
Australia. It was at a concert party at the Palace Pier, Brighton, in 1936
that Avril Angers made her first theatrical appearance. With her slim
figure, high spirits, tuneful voice and good looks, she was soon to join the
Tiller Girls.

At Birmingham she made an impression in the 1936 Cinderella (Alexandra
Theatre) before taking on light concert work from 1937-44. In 1940 she was
with the Fol-de-Rols, a touring revue, and then for five years with Ensa,
the Entertainments National Service Association, which provided shows for
the troops at home and abroad.

She began broadcasting for the BBC radio service in 1944 when she made her
first West End appearance — in the Cyril Fletcher-Betty Astell revue, Keep
Going, at the Palace. At the Winter Garden Theatre in 1945 in the Leslie
Henson show, Gaieties, she showed, according to the critic J. C. Trewin,
“how cunningly moonstruck she could be”. In Make it a Date (Duchess, 1946),
a revue led by Max Wall, she “had a more rewarding chance”. She contrives
“to be at once both matter-of-fact and fiercely boisterous. The
Herbs-and-Simples monologue proves that she is of the Baddeley-Gingold clan”
.
In search of straight-play experience, Angers moved for a season to the
Connaught Theatre, Worthing, (1949). As “a guest artist”, she played Miss
Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love; then the title role in Aimee Stuart’s
Jeannie, the 1940 hit for the Scottish actress Barbara Mullen.

Other leading roles which she found out of town included Madeleine in Sacha
Guitry’s sophisticated French comedy, Don’t Listen, Ladies, and the
wise-cracking American dumb blonde, Billie Dawn, in Garson Kanin’s hit, Born
Yesterday.

In 1951 she returned to the West End as Dolores in the farce, Mary Had a
Little . . . (Strand, 1951). But pantomime moved her more. As Robinson
Crusoe, Angers spent seasons at Wimbledon (1953) and Folkestone (1955).

After the try-out of a peculiar American comedy, The Night Life of a Virile
Potato (Lyric, Hammersmith, 1960), Angers went to Australia in the revue
Paris by Night for most of 1962. After returning to England for out-of-town
parts in 1964, she found herself heading the company as the elder Belle
Poitrine in an imported American musical comedy, Little Me, (Cambridge)
which Neil Simon adapted from Patrick Dennis’s novel. As B. A. Young wrote:
“Avril Angers plays her in maturity — an admirable but unrewarding
performance, since she always appears in her little linking scenes on the
tail of someone else’s applause. She has a duet with her younger self,
Eileen Gourlay, at the end, to show what a talented performer she really is
when she gets the chance.”

In the 1970s Angers again played opposite Max Wall in Cockie! (Vaudeville),
stopping the show at one point “with her brilliant, heartbreaking” version
of Coward’s song, If Love Were All.

In Norman, Is That You? (Phoenix) Angers partnered the television comedian,
Harry Worth, and in the exceptionally long-running comedy, No Sex, Please,
We’re British (Strand, 1975) she took over the role of the mother-in-law,
Eleanor Hunter.
After touring as Miss Skillon in the farce See How They Run, Angers took
over as Miss Marple in Murder at the Vicarage (Savoy); and in the 1980s
appeared in two of Coward’s one-act plays, Easy Virtue and Post-Mortem (King
’s Head, Islington).

Inevitably she seized every chance of pantomime at Croydon, Richmond, Bath
and Eastbourne. Finally, she played the Mother in the Gershwin musical,
Crazy for You (Prince Edward, 1993).

Her television credits included Dad’s Army, All Creatures Great and Small,
Are You Being Served?, Minder, Coronation Street and The Tomorrow People.
Among her films were Skimpy in the Navy, Lucky Mascot, The Green Man, Devils
of Darkness, The Family Way, Staircase, A Girl in My Soup and Two a Penny.

Avril Angers, actress and singer, was born on April 18, 1918. She died on
November 9, 2005, aged 87.

------------------------------------------

Daily Telegraph, London
Avril Angers
11/11/2005

Avril Angers, who has died aged 87, was one of the most zestful, charming and reliable character comediennes in the post-war London theatre; she also appeared in television series such as Dad's Army, All Creatures Great and Small, Are You Being Served?, Minder, Coronation Street and The Tomorrow People.

A trouper who was a Tiller Girl at 14 and took leads in provincial pantomime at 15, Avril Angers wrote her own material as an adolescent in summer shows. With her ebullient personality, sharp sense of timing and sound theatrical training, she was fitted for anything from radio, cabaret and television series to West End thrillers, classical revivals, musical comedies and farces.

It was, however, on the stage that she made her name in the now defunct but once popular tradition of West End satirical revue, presided over in the 1940s by such comediennes as Hermione Gingold and Hermione Baddeley.

As Avril Angers moved commandingly about the stage, with a gleam in her eye and pertness of manner which heralded the delivery of a barbed comment or a cruel lyric, the shapely young brunette was often compared with the two Hermiones as a likely successor in their brand of satire.

If she arrived in the West End a little late to triumph in revue, her comic persona flourished on stage and television, particularly in provincial pantomime and in television partnerships with comedians like Benny Hill, Arthur Askey, Frankie Howerd, Terry-Thomas and Les Dawson, and in shows such as Dad's Army and Coronation Street.

In a career that spanned six decades, West End credits included revue with Max Wall in Make It a Date (1946); the musical comedy Little Me (1964); the farce The Mating Game (1972); and the tribute to CB Cochran, Cockie (1973). She was in the American comedy Norman, Is That You? (1975); the long-running farce No Sex, Please, We're British (1975); Agatha Christie's whodunnit Murder at the Vicarage (1976); and was the Mother in the Gershwin musical Crazy For You (1993).

The daughter of the comedian Harry Angers, she was born in Liverpool on April 18 1918 and educated at schools in England and Australia before making her first appearance at the Palace Pier, Brighton, in 1936.

After stints as a Tiller Girl and in assorted alternative capacities in pre-war summer shows, cabaret, pantomime and Fol-de-Rols revues, she joined Ensa in the Second World War, serving five years in the official organisation for entertaining the troops. She started broadcasting for the BBC radio service in 1944. It was when she was in Cairo with the troops that Douglas Moodlie saw her as a future radio personality, and Variety Bandbox gave her her big chance; followed by more than a year with the Carroll Levis radio show.

She first appeared in the West End in the Cyril Fletcher-Betty Astell revue Keep Going (Palace, 1944), followed by the Leslie Henson-Hermione Baddeley revue The Gaities (Winter Garden, 1945), in which her comedienne's gift for the non-sequitur and the moonstruck look first earned critical praise.

A year later, opposite Max Wall in Make It a Date (Duchess), Avril Angers won recognition for her way of achieving a style both matter-of-fact and boisterous and of delivering a monologue with finesse.

The era of such revues was drawing to a close; and Avril Angers found herself as often as not out of town in the legitimate theatre - as Miss Prue in Congreve's Love for Love; as Billie Dawn, the dumb blonde, in Born Yesterday and as Madeleine in Guitry's Don't Listen, Ladies, though she was back in the West End in 1951 in a dullish farce, Mary Had A Little... (Strand), which she helped to brighten.

Meanwhile, she had a topical musical slot called Look Back with Angers on the BBC radio show Roundabout, from which she was upset to be "given a rest" in 1959. From the 1930s through to the 1950s, she was a fixture as a cartoon character in Radio Fun, in a comic strip entitled The Adventures of Avril Angers.

After playing a charlady in a quirky comedy, The Nightlife of the Virile Potato (Lyric, Hammersmith, 1960), she went to Australia with the revue Paris by Night and then, in the West End, took the title role of the glamorous Belle Poitrine in an imported Broadway musical comedy, Little Me (Cambridge, 1964).

Other West End credits in the 1970s included Mrs Finney in the Ray Cooney production of The Mating Game (Apollo) and Peter Saunders's musical Cockie! (Vaudeville), again playing opposite Max Wall, in which she stopped the show with what a critic called her "brilliant, heartbreaking" version of Noel Coward's song If Love Were All. In the West End comedy Norman, Is that You? she partnered the comedian Harry Worth.

In No Sex, Please, We're British (Strand 1975), she took over the role of Eleanor Hunter. She also toured as Miss Skillon in the farce See How they Run and took over as Miss Marple in Murder at the Vicarage (Savoy).

Regional work included Mrs Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer (Birmingham Rep), a tour as Madame Arcati in Coward's Blithe Spirit (her favourite role), Miss Marple in A Murder is Announced, and tours of Cluedo, Oklahoma!, When we Are Married, The Killing of Sister George and, in the Middle and Far East, Cooney's Move Over Mrs Markham.

Film credits included Skimpy in the Navy, Lucky Mascot, The Green Man, Devils of Darkness, The Family Way, Staircase, A Girl in My Soup and Two a Penny, a dire vehicle for Cliff Richard and (implausibly) Billy Graham, in which she was splendid.

In the 1980s she appeared in two of Coward's lesser-known plays Easy Virtue and Post-Mortem (King's Head, Islington) and in pantomime at Croydon, Richmond, Bath and Eastbourne.

She never married.

julian_craster

The Guardian
Obituary - Avril Angers
Comedian, actor and singer, she was a versatile stage, radio and TV
performer

By Dennis Barker
Monday November 14, 2005

Avril Angers, who has died aged 87, was a comedian, actor, singer and star
of radio, theatre - and pantomime. On television she had a career that
spanned six decades, beginning in the postwar period with Terry-Thomas,
taking in such shows as Coronation Street and Dad's Army along the way, and
ending in the 1990s with Common As Muck and All Creatures Great and Small. A
onetime Tiller Girl, Angers had a particular talent for playing beguiling
but slightly wacky heroines and she could switch from below-stairs
earthiness to instant glamour with ease.

Born in Liverpool, the daughter of the Liverpool comedian Harry Angers and
of Lilian Errol, one of the original Fol de Rols concert party, Angers went
to various schools in England and Australia, and first appeared on the
boards in 1936 in the chorus of a show on Palace Pier, Brighton. That same
year she made her first big impression when she appeared at the Alexandra
Theatre, Birmingham, with the tiny comedian Wee Georgie Wood and the great
Dame, Clarkson Rose, in the title role of Cinderella.
Unlike the usual "magic" puff-of-smoke transformation of Cinderella when she
goes to the ball, this production had her dressed in full view of the
audience by two fairies. The run had hardly begun when one of the fairies
failed to appear. The other whispered to Angers that she was searching
backstage for Cinderella's second slipper, which was lost. In the end Angers
had to admit defeat and go on acting the part of the newly radiant heroine
hobbling about in only one slipper while backstage the two fairies were
coming to blows.

Angers was to find that happening a template for much of her life, which
included unusual incidents like the time she put £75 worth of fivers into an
envelope and sent it off to a radio producer instead of returning a script.
Afterwards she was convinced she had been robbed. Only a bewildered
telephone call from the producer gave her back her composure.

When war came, she appeared in Fol de Rols and then joined the armed forces
entertainment organisation Ensa. She spent two years in the Middle East and
West Africa and was awarded the Africa Star. In Cairo, she was spotted by
the BBC producer Douglas Moodie, who suggested that she should get in touch.
She made her first radio appearance in May 1944. It was that year too that
she made her west end stage debut in the review Keep Going, at the Palace.
This was followed in 1945 by The Gaieties, alongside Leslie Henson and
Hermione Baddeley, at the Winter Gardens.

Back on radio she made a vivid impact as the talent spotter Carroll Leviss's
unpredictable secretary in his regular series. Her radio career at one stage
embraced five shows at once: Bandbox, Navy Mixture, Merry Go Round, Wishing
You Well Again and Monday Night At Eight.

She claimed she was "almost forced" into television not long after the BBC's
service resumed after the war. She was appearing in the Make It a Date revue
at the Duchess Theatre with comedian Max Wall, when a very determined
producer asked her to appear on the small screen. There had been attempts to
get the whole revue on to television, but the impresarios, seeing TV as a
threat, refused. Angers decided to go it alone, and between 1946 and 1948
appeared regularly in Stars in Your Eyes.

Another of the television series that made her after the war was as Rosie
Lee in How Do You View, from 1949, with Terry-Thomas as a boss always being
bothered at unsuitable moments by the tea girl wanting to know how he wanted
his tea, while at the end of every show he enjoyed an imaginative interlude
with a glamour girl of his dreams. Both tea girl and beauty were played by
Angers.

At the beginning of the 1950s, she deliberately made regular guest
appearances with repertory companies, where the money was less but the
opportunities for broadening her range better. She appeared in plays varying
from Congreve's Love for Love (1949) to Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday
(1950).

In the 1950s her stage work took her around the country and by 1960 she was
starring at the Lyric Hammersmith in an American comedy The Nightlife of a
Virile Potato. She spent 1962 in Australia in the revue Paris By Night. Back
in London in 1964 she played the central role with Bruce Forsyth in the
musical Little Me and used her singing voice to good effect. Later she
featured in The Mating Game, Cockie - back with Max Wall - and No Sex,
Please, We're British. By 1976 she was playing Miss Marple in Agatha
Christie's Murder At the Vicarage. In the 1980s she appeared at the King's
Head in Islington in two Noel Coward plays, Post-Mortem and Easy Virtue.

Her first film was The Lucky Mascot (1948, also known as The Brass Monkey).
Told by actors and friends after shooting had ended that she was so good in
it that she should stand by for further film offers, she declined stage
offers and waited for the big film career to arrive. It never really did but
her next opportunity came with the comedian Hal Monty in Skimpy in the Navy
(1950). This was followed in the same year by Miss Pilgrim's Progress, and
in 1954 by Don't Blame the Stork. In 1956 she appeared in four films, Women
Without Men, The Green Man, Bond of Fear, and Blonde Bait. In 1957 came
Light Fingers.

On television, in 1954 she starred in two BBC sitcoms: one, Dear Dotty, set
on a women's magazine and the other, Friends and Neighbours, focusing on two
pairs of newlyweds. Two years later, she switched to the new ITV opposite
Sam Costa in the sketch series The Charlie Farnsbarns Show. With the birth
of Coronation Street in 1960 she featured as Norah Dawson.

By the time she was appearing in Common As Muck (1994), Roy Hudd had called
her "a wonderful professional". It was a television comedy series with
moments of dramatic depth about a group of dustbinmen facing privatisation.

In 1949 she announced her engagement to the actor Barry Wickes, only to
declare, nearly two years later, while in a summer show at Bexhill-on-Sea,
that she was "too busy" for marriage. She is survived by two brothers.

Avril Florence Angers, comedian, actor and singer, born April 18 1918; died
November 8 2005

julian_craster

From The Independent

Avril Angers
Comic actress described as 'a female Tony Hancock'
Published: 19 November 2005

Avril Florence Angers, actress: born Liverpool 18 April 1922; died London 8
November 2005.

The actress, singer and comedienne Avril Angers had a long and impressive
career that embraced stage, screen, television, radio and cabaret. Although
never a top star, she was a reliable performer much in demand by stars and
producers to bolster their supporting casts. Terry-Thomas, Victoria Wood and
Les Dawson were among those who appreciated the contribution she could make
to their work (she was once described as "a female Tony Hancock"), and she
has earned a footnote in history, too, by being one of the cast of the first
ever British television comedy series, How Do You View? (1949).

The BBC had made several attempts to find a comedy formula that would work
on television and not be just a radio show with sets and costumes, and this
showcase for the talents of gap-toothed comic Terry-Thomas, produced by Bill
Ward with the inventive sketches written by the star himself, proved an
enormous hit. Angers appeared on the show throughout its five series (with
Sid Colin and Talbot Rothwell joining the writing team), mainly playing the
recurring character of the canteen server Rosie Lee ("the girl with the
tea").

Angers was born in Liverpool in 1922. Her father, Harry Angers, was a
well-known comedian who appeared in two films, Oh for a Plumber (1933) and
My Irish Molly (1938), and her mother, Lillian Erroll, was a veteran of
concert parties and an original Fol-de-Rol.

An accomplished dancer by the time she was 14, Angers made her professional
début in 1936 as part of a concert party troupe on the Palace Pier,
Brighton, and the following year she was playing Cinderella in Birmingham.
In 1940 she herself became a member of the Fol-de-Rols, before appearing
with Ensa for most of the Second World War years.

She made her West End début in the revue Keep Going (1944), but first made a
major impact when the following year Leslie Henson brought Henson's
Gaieties, a show with which he had been entertaining the troops, to the
Winter Garden Theatre. Heavily revising the show for London audiences, he
signed Angers as leading lady, other cast members including Carroll Gibbons
and his Orchestra and Graham Payn. Angers was described by one critic as "a
Betty Hutton with a sophisticated subtlety".

Much of her stage work thereafter was outside London - she was Miss Prue in
Love for Love (1949) in Worthing, and in 1950 she starred as Billie Dawn
(the role created on Broadway by Judy Holliday) in an Isle of Man production
of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday. She also made frequent appearances in
pantomime.

Already a prolific radio performer, her role in How Do You View? made her
equally in demand for television. In 1954 Bill Ward, Sid Colin and Talbot
Rothwell reunited four members of the earlier show - Angers, Janet Brown,
Peter Butterworth and Benny Lee - in Friends and Neighbours, in which the
foursome played two married couples who live next to each other in flats
converted in a large Victorian house.

Later, in 1954, she was given her own show, Dear Dotty, set in the offices
of a women's magazine, in which she was a minor employee whose efforts to
become a journalist result in a series of comic misadventures. Dear Dotty is
credited with making Angers the first comedienne to have her own story-line
series on television.

On stage, Angers toured for a time with the popular talent show hosted by
Carroll Levis, and she made her screen début with Levis in the
comedy-thriller The Brass Monkey (1948). Playing herself, and given co-star
billing, she had what would, ironically, be her most substantial screen
role. As Levis's scatterbrained secretary, she emulated Gracie Allen, though
much of the material was weak. She did, however, provide one of the film's
highlights with her Huttonesque rendition of a splendid piece of special
material, "Home Sweet Home", written for her by Steve Race and Sid Colin, in
which she sang of the noisy neighbours in the apartment building to which
she had just moved.

Angers's other films included Miss Pilgrim's Progress (1949), The Green Man
(1956) with Alastair Sim and George Cole, Two a Penny (1967) with Cliff
Richard, and There's a Girl in My Soup (1970), with Peter Sellers and Goldie
Hawn. Her roles were generally small but given a zestful spark by her
skilled playing. One of her best roles was that of Hayley Mills's shrewish
mother in the screen version of Bill Naughton's play The Family Way (1966),
about a young married couple beset by family problems. Mills said, "I have
great affection for The Family Way . . . working with my father, and darling
Avril Angers as my mum."

In 1964, Angers returned to the West End in one of her finest stage roles,
that of the flamboyant fictitious screen star Belle Poitrine, whose memoirs
are the subject of the show, Little Me, with songs by Cy Coleman and Carolyn
Leigh. Neil Simon, who wrote the libretto based on the book by Patrick
Dennis, conceived the idea of having all Belle's seven lovers played by one
actor - on Broadway Sid Caesar, and in London Bruce Forsyth. Although
Forsyth won most of the principal acclaim with his tour-de-force
performance, Angers was highly lauded, and was particularly effective in her
opening song, "The Truth" in which she promises that her book will tell all
("With the areas I'll expose, I'll annihilate Gypsy Rose"), and in a
show-stopping rendition of the title song, duetted with her younger self
(Eileen Gourlay).

Her last West End appearance was in another Broadway musical, Crazy for You
(1996), with songs by the Gershwins. Her later television appearances
included Dad's Army (in which she played a telephone operator in two
episodes), The Liver Birds, Are You Being Served?, Minder, Dangerous Davies:
the last detective and, in 1994, the series Common as Muck.

Tom Vallance