Bright and bubbly, tart and twinkly, Una Stubbs, who has died aged 84, was a revue regular and a Palladium pantomime principal boy who parlayed her natural song-and-dance talent into a later, diverse career on the classical stage.
In earlier years she was best known for her roles alongside Cliff Richard in two high-spirited pop musical movies – Summer Holiday (1963) and Wonderful Life (1964) – and as Alf Garnett’s daughter, Rita Rawlins, married to a socialist layabout (Anthony Booth, Cherie Blair’s father and so Tony’s father-in-law), in Johnny Speight’s classic TV series Till Death Us Do Part (1965‑75) and in episodes of its 1980s sequel, In Sickness and in Health.
Both of these incarnations are unimaginable today: a docile, amenable dolly bird hanging around Cliff and the Shadows, and a tolerant but incipiently trendy daughter of a loud-mouthed racist bigot – in Warren Mitchell’s brilliant and relentless performance – in the postwar Wapping sitcom that became a whopping hit.
Stubbs transcended, or at least sidestepped, these cultural contrasts by the simple expedient of always being herself, honest and translucent in all she did. She had the ability to shine in revues (at the Mermaid theatre) based on the works of Noël Coward and Cole Porter, as well as in Shakespeare and Schiller directed by Michael Grandage – her latterday mentor – in Sheffield and the West End, or even Ibsen at the National Theatre.
Wherever she went, she sparkled, and the longevity of her career was remarkable. She started out as a 16-year-old dancer in a Folies Bergère-style musical revue, Pardon My French, with the great hangdog comic Frankie Howerd and the pianist Winifred Atwell at the Prince of Wales in 1953, and finished as a touchingly concerned Mrs Hudson in the BBC’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (2010-17).
She was geared to be fast and funny. There were no barriers. She was “the Dairy Box girl” in an early TV ad in 1955, her breathy, adenoidal voice instantly memorable, and she was soon starring in the West End revue On the Brighter Side (1959-60) at the Phoenix – with the incomparable Stanley Baxter, Betty Marsden and Ronnie Barker.
Una was born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, where her mother, Angela (nee Rawlinson), worked in the cutting room of Denham film studios nearby, and her father, Clarence Stubbs, was a factory worker with Shredded Wheat. Her great-grandfather was Ebenezer Howard, the founder of Welwyn Garden City.
The middle of three children – a sister, Claire, was two years older; a brother, Paul, two years younger – Una struggled to assert herself as they all grew up in Hinckley, Leicestershire.
She trained at the La Roche dancing school in Slough (“There’s posh,” she said) and made a debut at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, as the fairy Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 1955 she was dancing at the London Palladium, and in 1956 appeared in both ITV’s Cool for Cats, the first-ever teen pop music show, with the Dougie Squires dancers, and as “a starlet” at the Venice film festival in Grab Me a Gondola, an unjustly forgotten British musical in which Joan Heal gave a celebrated performance as a wannabe film star. Stubbs met her first husband, the actor Peter Gilmore (the lead mariner in BBC TV’s The Onedin Line in the 1970s), whom she married in 1958, on these gigs. The marriage ended in divorce in 1969.
After the Cliff Richard films and during Till Death Us Do Part, there was a step-change when she met Nicky Henson, whom she married in 1969, and joined the Young Vic. She appeared there as the Princess in The Soldier’s Tale (Henson was the Soldier), and in Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against The Eunuchs. In 1975 Stubbs played the lead role in Irma la Douce, directed by Dougie Squires, at the Watford Palace, in which she exploded like a firecracker in the big set-piece number Dis Donc.
Her place in popular television culture was sealed in the next few years as she appeared in Fawlty Towers with John Cleese (in The Anniversary, oddly hitched with Ken Campbell); as the ferocious Aunt Sally in Worzel Gummidge (1979-81) with Jon Pertwee; and as team captain, opposite her great friend Lionel Blair, in the television show that brought parlour game charades into the 1980s, Give Us a Clue.
Her second great phase as a stage actor began at the Royal Exchange in Manchester in the 1990s – Mrs Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, Lady Markby in An Ideal Husband – culminating in a devastating and wholly unexpected performance as Terence Rattigan’s confused and desperate heroine Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea, in a production at the Mercury theatre in Colchester in 1997 directed by Grandage.
She began the new millennium as a hilarious sidekick to Penelope Keith in a touring (and West End) stage adaptation of the Noël Coward short story Star Quality (2001‑02), and got serious as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet at Chichester in 2002 (Emily Blunt was Juliet). In 2005 she joined the National Theatre, playing Mrs Holt in Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community, with Damian Lewis and Lesley Manville; two years later, her “legit” status increasing, she joined Peter Hall’s summer season at the Theatre Royal, Bath, to play a delightful Mrs Pearce in Pygmalion, a revival that, with Tim Pigott-Smith as Higgins and Michelle Dockery as Eliza, transferred to the Old Vic.
When Grandage took over at the Sheffield Crucible, then succeeded Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse, Stubbs was a regular part of his team, and a revelation, as a pert and fiery Maria in Twelfth Night, a starchy lady-in-waiting in Schiller’s Don Carlos, with Derek Jacobi, and a choric mainstay of a wonderful revival of TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion, with Samuel West and Penelope Wilton, in 2008.
In the same year, she registered a beautiful comic cameo in the gorgeous Menier Chocolate Factory revival of La Cage aux Folles starring Douglas Hodge. She returned to the National in 2012 to feature strongly in Marianne Elliott’s superb staging of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as the neighbour who spills the beans about mother “doing sex” with Mr Shears.
Her television career remained eclectic, as she popped up in EastEnders as Caroline Bishop in 2006, and in various episodes of Benidorm, Midsomer Murders and The Durrells. From 2010 onwards she was busy as Mrs Hudson in Sherlock, but managed one last movie outing in John Miller’s Ealing Comedy-style pensioners’ criminal caper Golden Years (2016).
She enjoyed embroidery and painting, writing two books on the former – Una Stubbs in Stitches (1984) and A Stitch in Time (1985), which expanded into a self-help volume on single motherhood – and indulging her well-trained eye for the latter in co-hosting (with Richard Bacon) the first series, in 2015, of BBC TV’s The Big Painting Challenge.
Her marriage to Henson ended in divorce in 1975. She is survived by their sons, Christian and Joe, and by Jason, the son of her first marriage.
Una Stubbs, actor, born 1 May 1937; died 12 August 2021
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