mallee59

RIP Mollie
and thanks for the laughs you have left us with
Mallee

The only problem with having an open mind is that others keep trying to put things in it...

Ray

Considering that she was in one of the most successful shows for the BBC, they could have spared more than what seemed like 20 seconds mentioning her sad death. What a contrast to the endless, over the top reporting on Michael Jackson every day for the past week. At least ITV showed a tribute to Mollie from Trevor Bannister, (Mr Lucas), as well as a clip from the show.

cornershop15

Exactly halfway through the year yesterday and three more deaths to make us more depressed (Karl Malden and Harve Presnell being the others). What a sad couple of years it's been for fans of Are You Being Served? - John Inman, Wendy Richard (quite recently as well) and now Mollie Sugden. It was nice to see Trevor again, however, albeit in sad circumstances.

At least she can be with her husband now, William Moore. He played Betty Turpin's husband Cyril in Coronation Street in her early years. Mollie and William both had famous catchphrases - her with "My pussy ..." () and him with "Language, Timothy!" - which must be unique for a husband and wife.

When you understand the past, the confusion of the present becomes clearer - John Betjeman.

Windthrop

The Guardian Obit

Mollie Sugden
Actor most likely to be remembered for playing Mrs Slocombe in the 1970s television comedy series Are You Being Served?
Dennis Barker
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 12.21

The actor Mollie Sugden, who has died aged 86, was part of a long and honourable – though now almost extinct – line of British battleaxes. The characters played by this portly and mock-severe actress were almost always plebianised versions of Oscar Wilde's grand dame Lady Bracknell, with dodgily "refined" accent and implausibly overdone patrician gesticulations. She is most likely to be remembered for the character of Mrs Slocombe from the television comedy series Are You Being Served? and its successor Grace and Favour, the saga of a department store kept by the feudal Grace family, to whom all loyal employees are expected to bow and scrape even lower than they are expected to bow and scrape to the customers.

Arch, unconvincingly haughty, protected by a cocoon of unworldliness, and apt to launch into ambiguous remarks about the current plight of her pussy, the overseer of the lingerie department Mrs Slocombe was part of a very funny series which dominated 1970s television comedy after a rocky start, in which many BBC executives doubted the wisdom of introducing such a bawdy mock-genteel band of seaside-postcard types to the nation's screens.

Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, who wrote the series, had to fight hard to retain the character of the camp shop assistant Mr Humphries, always keen to measure clients' inside legs and played by John Inman. Once they threatened to walk away from the series unless he were retained. "Get rid of the poof!" one BBC executive told Croft, to receive the reply, "If the poof goes, I go." It is distinctly possible that the Inman character was the lightning conductor that saved Mrs Slocombe from humourless attack on the grounds that she made a certain sort of woman look ridiculous. As it was, the nation took both Mr Humphries and Mrs Slocombe to its heart, and the BBC successfully exported the series to many other countries.

Mollie Sugden, as a result, became an unlikely cult figure in the US when, in the 1990s, the 60 episodes of the series were run and re-run there. In Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, Are You Being Served? was on screen five nights a week, and Mollie Sugden, according to American newspapers, was a better-known figure than the then British prime minister John Major. When Sugden and Inman went to Tennessee to popularise the series there, the queues of admirers and autograph hunters stretched twice around the studio building.

For Sugden, Are You Being Served? was part of a hat-trick. Her other memorable television roles were Nellie Harvey, the rival landlord to Annie Walker in Coronation Street, and Mrs Hutchinson, the irritably snobbish mother of Sandra in The Liver Birds who is a sore embarrassment to both Sandra and her flat-mate in Liverpool. Her husband in the latter series was played by her real husband, the actor William Moore, a former professor of drama at the Old Vic School of Drama, Bristol. They met at Swansea rep, one of the many repertory companies she joined in the first eight years of her professional life, where they earned £12 a week. They announced their engagement when she was appearing in Saturday Night at the Crown at the Garrick Theatre, London. They had twin sons.

The Coronation Street and Liverpool roles were more in line with her own geographical background. After she was the subject of a This Is Your Life television programme, she mildly complained that her story had been portrayed as one of rags to riches, whereas in fact she had few rags in her past and little riches in her present.

But her background was certainly rough-hewn. She was born Mary Isobel Sugden in Keighley in West Yorkshire. She discovered her flair for self-projection early. At four she heard a woman getting applause for reciting a funny poem at a village concert, and the following year stood on a chair and did a recitation; the audience collapsed with laughter and she decided that comedy was her forte. She was educated at Keighley girls' grammar school, and when she went to Holland in a party of 800 British schoolgirls, she was chosen to represent them in a concert in Amsterdam.

At 23 and after two years of study and three awards, she graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, maintaining that the school had smoothed out her northern accent and made her talk like a duchess. She went straight to a repertory company in Accrington in Lancashire, where she performed a twice-nightly play with Eric Sykes. Three months later, for £3 a week, she moved to Oldham rep. There she learned one of the maxims she followed: that situation comedy has to be taken seriously if you are to please the audience rather than yourself.

It was a rule she brought to all her television roles, in shows which included Hugh and I, Please Sir!, Doctor in the House, For the Love of Ada, That's My Boy, My Husband and I, and the programme written especially for her by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, Come Back Mrs Noah, a surreal series in which a housewife in 2050 accidentally launches herself into space without a pilot and can't get back, which required her to be not much like Mrs Slocombe and was not nearly as big a success.

She knew that, despite the enormous following of the battleaxes she created, she was an unassuming supporting player rather than an "important" star. When her husband was once asked what item she would not be able to do without on a desert island, he said the complete works of Shakespeare. She herself said: "My knitting bag, stuffed with lots of wool – I'd never get bored."

Her husband died in 2000; her sons survive her.


Mary Isobel Sugden, actress, born 21 July 1922; died 1 July 2009

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Windthrop

The Independent Obit

Mollie Sugden: Actress renowned for playing Mrs Slocombe in the 1970s sitcom 'Are You Being Served?'

Friday, 3 July 2009

Playing mothers, mother-in-laws and battleaxes gave Mollie Sugden four decades of television stardom, but her greatest fame came as the brassy Mrs Slocombe in the department-store sitcom Are You Being Served?


The dragon of Grace Brothers' lingerie department, with her nose in the air and different-colour rinses in her hair, hated the camp menswear assistant Mr Humphries, tolerated the floor-walker Captain Peacock, looked down at both the porter Mr Harman and the junior menswear assistant Mr Spooner, mothered her own assistant, Miss Brahms, and buttered up the store manager, Mr Rumbold. She voiced her opinions loudly and seaside-postcard humour emanated from the antics of her "pussy", the pet who was never seen.

"We've all seen the type – too much make-up, dolled up to the nines, a beauty spot stuck firmly on the cheek and an arrogant belief that the customer is always wrong," was how Sugden summed up the character.

Are You Being Served?, written by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, was first seen as a pilot in the BBC's Comedy Playhouse series (1972). Its double entendres and sexual innuendo quickly attracted audiences when it was turned into a series (1973-85).

The action centred on Grace Brothers' ladies' and menswear departments. Sugden said she based Mrs Slocombe, the head of ladies' fashions, on store assistants she had encountered. "Personally, I like Mrs Slocombe," explained the actress. "She's really very insecure and vulnerable. She's lonely, too. Mr Slocombe left her years ago – and can you blame him?"

Regularly attracting audiences of 15 million at its height, Are You Being Served? spawned a 1977 feature film, with the staff taking a package holiday in the fictional Spanish resort of Costa Plonka.

Sugden's instinct to perform comedy came early on in her life. Born Mary Isobel Sugden in the West Yorkshire town of Keighley in 1922, the daughter of a builders' merchant who was also a lay preacher, she was four when she heard a woman reciting a funny poem at a church event, memorised it and surprised her family by retelling it at a Christmas party a few months later. "As soon as I'd finished," she recalled, "everyone fell to the floor with laughter. Their response made me think how wonderful it was to make people laugh."

A year later, she played a cat in a Sunday school play. Elocution lessons followed, then drama classes in nearby Bradford from the age of 11, when she attended Keighley Girls' Grammar School. During the Second World War, Sugden made shells in a Keighley munitions factory.

Then, in pursuit of her acting ambitions, she enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London, where her northern accent was ironed out. On leaving, she spent eight years in repertory theatre, often playing refined women and duchesses.

However, Thora Hird and the writer Walter Greenwood saw Sugden's photograph while casting a stage comedy in Blackpool and gave her the role of a buxom, randy northern widow. This brought the actress attention and she landed her first television comedy, playing the snooty neighbour Mrs Crispin in Hugh and I (1962-67) , which starred Hugh Lloyd as a lodger in Terry Scott's mother's house in Tooting, South London.

In 1964, Sugden briefly took over the role of Jimmy Clitheroe's mother in the hugely popular radio comedy The Clitheroe Kid, featuring the 4ft 3in Lancashire comedian as an eternally naughty schoolboy. She then played the part permanently in the television version, Just Jimmy (1964-66).

The actress stepped into the straight role of Lotte in the BBC's acclaimed drama series The Six Wives of Henry VIII (starring Keith Michell, 1970) and appeared on and off in Coronation Street for more than 10 years (1965-76) as Nellie Harvey, landlady of the Laughing Donkey, a performance of comic subtlety as the character jostled for supremacy on the pub trade's social circuit with the Rovers Return's Annie Walker.

But Sugden was most recognisable in television sitcoms. She took the role of Flavia in Up Pompeii! (1969-70), continued her penchant for snobs by playing Mrs Hutchinson (the actress Nerys Hughes's imperious mother) in The Liver Birds (1971-79), basing the character on a family friend, and acted mothers to Jack Smethurst in For the Love of Ada (1971), Robin Nedwell in Doctor in Charge (1972), John Alderton in My Wife Next Door (1972), Terry Scott in Son of the Bride (1973) and Brian Rix in Men of Affairs (1973-74).

In between series of Are You Being Served?, Sugden starred for the first time in her own sitcoms. In Home to Roost (1974-75) on radio, she and Deryck Guyler played Mr and Mrs Wheeler, coming to terms with living with each other all day long in retirement. Then, on television, Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft's Come Back Mrs Noah (1978) featured Sugden as a middle-aged housewife marooned in space. More successfully, she teamed up with Christopher Blake in That's My Boy (1981-86) to play Ida Willis, a down-to-earth housekeeper who discovers that her employer, a doctor, is the son she gave away for adoption.

The sitcom's writers, Pam Valentine and Michael Ashton, subsequently wrote My Husband and I (1987-88), in which Sugden and her real-life actor husband, William Moore, played Nora and George Powers. As the head of personnel at Ashvale Advertising, Nora found the unemployed George a lowly positon with the company but was constantly embarrassed by his attitude.

Sugden subsequently revived two of her comedy characters – Mrs Slocombe in two series of Grace and Favour (1992-93), Lloyd and Croft's sitcom featuring staff from the closed-down Grace Brothers running a country hotel, and Mrs Hutchinson in a new series of The Liver Birds (1996).

Anthony Hayward

Mary Isobel Sugden (Mollie Sugden), actress: born Keighley, West Yorkshire 21 July 1922; married William Moore (died 2000; two sons); died Guildford, Surrey 1 July 2009.

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patacake

My husband worked with her on a sitcom once and said how very nice she was. RIP Molly.

caliban

Thanks for giving us so much laughter over the years. R.I.P. Mollie.

SirOllyBolly

Here's a rather nice tribute to Mollie as Mrs Slocombe - video accompanied by Matt Munro

SirOllyBolly

"What fresh lunacy is this?"

manor43

Americans loved Mollie. "Are you being served" was a hugh success in the USA and is still being shown in reruns. I watched one last night and still laughed as much as if were seeing it for the first time. So many of my friends here in New York are so saddened by Mollie's passing.