julian_craster

Obituary: Ursula Howells
Daily Telegraph
01/11/2005

Ursula Howells, the character actress, who has died aged 83, was an unfailingly elegant interpreter of fraught femininity and nervous anxiety; her 50-year career began on stage in the West End and included cult horror films and energetic comedies, while latterly she became familiar to television audiences for her roles as Frances Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga (1967) and Kitty Cazalet in The Cazalets (2001).

In her youth she was a brunette of singular charm and emotional sensitivity, but Ursula Howells also possessed a sharp sense of comedy; her plummy, gravelly voice and warm personality could be counted upon to enliven the dullest dramaturgy, and she was equally at home playing teachers or aristocrats, flirts or frumps, aunts or academics, nagging wives or haughty temptresses.

Ursula Howells was born in London on September 17 1922 and educated at St Paul's Girls' School, where her father, the musician and composer Herbert Howells, a doyen of English church music, taught music for 26 years.

She rarely spoke of her achievements at school, but during the recent Ashes series she revealed that at the age of 16 she had been selected to play cricket for the England Women's team, but had never played because she was thought to be too young.

In 1935, when Ursula was 12, her brother, Michael, died suddenly of polio. The family was devastated, and it was Ursula who suggested that her father channel his grief into his composition.

The result was Herbert Howells's great choral masterpiece, Hymnus Paradisi.

During the war the teenage Ursula was evacuated to Scotland. "I wanted to go on stage," she later recalled, "and had a scholarship to a school which closed down, then to another one which was bombed.

" Fortunately, Anthony Hawtrey, a friend of her father who was running a repertory theatre in Dundee, gave her a job, initially as a secretary and then as the theatre's leading lady, following the sudden dismissal of her predecessor. She made her debut on her 18th birthday.

After two seasons with the Oxford Repertory Company, in the mid-1940s Ursula Howells rejoined Hawtrey at the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, which he ran as a try-out theatre for the West End. There she made her London debut in 1945.

Having played Henrietta Turnbull in JM Barrie's Quality Street, she distinguished herself as Judith Drave, a schoolteacher anxious to expose the wicked landlady in Joan Temple's much-admired wartime drama of bullied evacuees, No Room At The Inn.

Her other Embassy parts included the Hon Elizabeth Wimpole in Harold Brooke and Kay Bannerman's satire Fit for Heroes; in the West End, she played Judy in Ronald Millar's respected contemporary drama Frieda, about British war heroes who married their German nurses.

In 1946 she acted in RF Delderfield's Peace Comes to Peckham, and the following year played Ann Tower in SN Behrman's version of Jane, a Somerset Maugham short story.

She was engaging as a fractious fiancée in Hagar Wilde's Honour and Obey, and she delighted audiences as the attractive sister caught kissing a housemaster on Founder's Day in Master of Arts (Strand and Vaudeville, 1949), William Douglas Home's early comedy about blackmail at a public school.

Ursula Howells's broadcasting career began in 1946 with Sweet Lavender. In 1950 she made her big screen debut opposite Richard Todd, Glynis Johns and Joan Greenwood in the medieval costume drama Flesh and Blood.

Although she continued to make West End appearances during the next three decades (notably as Cynthia Randolph in Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus in 1967, and Ruth in Blithe Spirit in 1970), she was increasingly in demand as a television and film actress.

During the 1950s, she appeared in The Constant Husband (1955) and in the police drama The Long Arm (1956) with Jack Hawkins. The 1960s saw her starring in several popular British horror films, notably Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965) and Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), a cult film among horror aficionados.

Her appearance in The Forsyte Saga established Ursula Howells as a regular in television comedy and drama, ranging from Father Dear Father (1968-73) to A Rather English Marriage.

In 1985 she played the psychopath Lettie Blacklock with great gusto in A Murder is Announced, one of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories. She also made regular appearances in Bergerac, Lovejoy, Heartbeat and Midsomer Murders.

After her father's death in 1983, Ursula Howells became a standard-bearer for the promotion of his work. In addition to instigating the Herbert Howells Society in 1987, she financially supported the recording of his compositions and did much to encourage the publishing and promotion of church music.

In 1988, following the death of her husband, the director and screenwriter Anthony Pelissier, she moved to Petworth, Sussex, where her warmth and generosity were extended to friends of all ages. She was also an active supporter of the Petworth Festival.

Ursula Howells, who died on October 16, had a brief first marriage, to Davy Dodd, in 1949. She married Anthony Pelissier in 1968. Although she had no children of her own, she was a loving stepmother to his son and three daughters, who survive her.

smudge

Sad news.

A singular actress with exquisite features who never seemed to age.

Wonderful as Valdemar's widow in DR. TERRORS HOUSE OF HORRORS, and coolly efficient as Roger Moore's secretary in CROSSPLOT.

Rest in peace.

SMUDGE

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

harryfielder

I remember her as the posh lady,...RIP..

Aitch,

http://www.turnipnet.com/aitch/aitch/gallery.htm

JamesM

I had been trying to persuade Redemption / Salvation Films to engege my services to produce an audio commentary for "Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly" with director Freddie Francis, screenwriter Brian Comport with Ursula but sadly this can no longer occur. I was looking forward to the opportunity but Redemption did not seem too interested. They are releasing the film though, next year I suspect.[quote]and I was awaiting to hear from them.

julian_craster

I saw Ursula Howells in a play with Leslie Phillips and Naunton Wayne at Norwich Theatre Royal in 1963........

Obituaries - The Times November 04, 2005

Ursula Howells
September 17, 1922 - October 16, 2005
British actress who made the role of elegant upper-class English women her own

URSULA HOWELLS began acting with Dundee Repertory Theatre during the Second World War and made her film debut as Richard Todd’s lover in the 1951 melodrama Flesh and Blood, but she was well into her forties when her career truly blossomed and she became one of English television’s bestknown character actresses.
The groundbreaking 26-part television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga (1967), in which she played Jolyon’s wife, Frances, was the first in a series of prestigious literary adaptations that included Hard Times (1977) and most recently The Cazalets (2001). She was matriarch Kitty Cazalet.

She also had a major success in the popular sitcom Father, Dear Father (1968-73), alongside Patrick Cargill, with whom she had worked regularly in Dundee more than quarter of a century earlier.

Cargill played a writer left in charge of their two troublesome teenage daughters. Howells’s character had remarried and had supposedly relocated to Italy, though she made increasingly frequent appearances on the series. Storylines had Cargill fretting over the paternity of the children and the validity of the divorce and in one episode he even persuades Howells to pretend they are still married for the benefit of a couple who disapprove of divorce.

When Father, Dear Father came to an end, London Weekend Television reunited Cargill and Howells and introduced five more ex-spouses in The Many Wives of Patrick (1976), an unsuccessful attempt to tap into a similar comic seam.

Elegant and husky-voiced, Howells specialised in upper-class, often-titled English ladies, though a genteel façade sometimes concealed more sinister depths. In the Agatha Christie adaptation A Murder is Announced (1985) the retired spinster is not quite as demure as she first appears, while in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) her character turned out to be a werewolf.

Born in London in 1922, Howells was the daughter of composer Herbert Howells, who is best known for his English church music. During the Second World War she was evacuated to Scotland, though neither the move nor the hostilities dampened her ambitions to act. Family connections secured an opening at Dundee Rep and a disagreement between leading lady and producer gave her an early stab at a starring role.

“He sacked her on Saturday and we were opening the next production on Monday,” she said. “He looked at me and said ‘You’re on’. I had never been on the stage before.” She had just turned 18 when she made her debut in the John Drinkwater comedy Bird in Hand in 1940. “Because they hadn’t had anyone new for ages, the local critic gave this long review saying I was the greatest thing since Sarah Bernhardt. I played lead after lead.”

Over the next two years she appeared in more than 30 productions in Dundee, including drama, comedy and pantomime, often starring alongside the young Patrick Cargill. She returned to London, acted in the West End and in films, beginning with Flesh and Blood and I Believe in You (1952). In the latter Basil Dearden and Michael Relph attempted to reprise the comparatively realistic approach Dearden had used to portray the police in The Blue Lamp, this time with parole officers. She played a society woman with a drink problem in a cast that included Laurence Harvey and Joan Collins.

She was in J. Lee Thompson’s women’s prison drama The Weak and the Wicked (1953), with Diana Dors, and played an unfaithful wife in Account Rendered (1957), but many of her films from the 1950s and 1960s were quickly forgotten and she never graduated to the roles that would have established her as a leading film star to rival Collins and Dors.

Her film career might have seemed in danger of stalling when she made three horror films in fairly quick succession, though they were to prove more enduring in their appeal than virtually anything else she did on the big screen. Steve Coogan referenced Dr Terror’s House of Horrors in the title of his spoof series Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible (2001).

The dividing line between horror and black comedy was often slim anyway. In Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969) she was a matriarch with a strange notion of family values. Monthly Film Bulletin commented: “Ursula Howells, murmuring ‘Oh, Girly!’ in tones of mild reproach when she discovers Nanny’s head cooking on the stove in a stewpot, is a delight throughout.”

She might have found herself typecast in such Grand Guignol affairs were it not for the success of The Forsyte Saga and Father, Dear Father. The Forsyte Saga propelled her to the front of the queue for roles as older women in period dramas and later credits include Cousin Bette (1971), a guest appearance in Upstairs, Downstairs (1975) and The Barchester Chronicles (1982).

She was married to Anthony Pelissier, a film director and writer, the son of actress Fay Compton (who was also in The Forsyte Saga) and nephew of writer Compton Mackenzie. Pelissier died in 1988. She is survived by four stepchildren.

Ursula Howells, actress, was born on September 17, 1922. She died on October 16, 2005, aged 83.