In the 1960’s when Swingin London was taken the world by storm, blonde British actresses were in vogue. Julie Christie led the pack, but she was quickly followed by Susannah York and then Carol White, Judy Geeson and Suzy Kendall. She was born in 1966 in Derbyshire in England. She was a photographic model before she became an actress. Her first film was “Up Jimped A Swagman” with the Australian pop singer Frank Ifield in 1965. Her breakthrough role was in the London made international hit “To Sir With Love” which also starred Sidney Poitier, Judy Geeson, Christian Roberts, Lulu and a scarcely recongnisable Patricia Routledge. Suzy Kendall was given then lead in “Up the Junction” with a young Denis Waterman. Seen to-day it seems very dated, somewhat patronising to working class people but at the same time capturing the look of London in the 1960’s. Suzy Kendall went to Hollywood to make “Darker thean Amber” with Rod Taylor. She went on to Italy to make a series of grizzly slasher films before retiring from film in the late seventies. She was at one time married to the gifted Dudley Moore.
Her minibiography on the IMDB website:
doe-eyed, honey-blond actress of extraordinary beauty, Suzy Kendall was one of the most popular British actresses of the 1960s. Yet, she never really sought the spotlight and accepted fame only reluctantly. Born as Freida Harrison, her goal was actually to be a clothing designer and, in fact, she majored in fabric and fashion design at Derby College. In pursuing her studies, she inevitably ran into fashion photographers and agents. With few exceptions, they were very taken by her looks and urged her to go into modeling. While not particularly interested in that line of work, she was flattered by the compliments and saw a chance to make some extra income. In addition, she saw it as a way to draw attention to her fashion ideas. So, she signed up with a recommended agency, who gave her the name Suzy Kendall. To her surprise, she immediately was in constant demand. This was at a time when there was increased crossover in the British entertainment industry, with singers appearing in motion pictures. Before long, she began to receive film offers and, while not trained as an actress, was persuaded by her agents to accept film and television roles. The first roles were minor in nature, but included a part in the spy caper The Liquidator (1965), which was a major success. She became internationally known with her prominent role in To Sir, with Love (1967), a sort of British version of Blackboard Jungle (1955). That same year, she starred in the crime thriller The Penthouse (1967), playing a woman taken hostage by violent criminal predators. She disliked the film, but it was a major hit. It was around this time that she met the highly talented and famous but insecure Dudley Moore, with whom she co-starred in 30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia (1968). They immediately hit it off and gradually became a couple, marrying in 1968. At Moore’s urging, she accepted the title role in Fraulein Doktor (1969), in which she plays a World War I femme fatale, based onMata Hari.
In spite of some good reviews, it was not a success. However, her career was boosted again in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), in which she plays the girlfriend of a murder suspect who becomes the target of the real killer. The film was an international success and made director Dario Argento a household name among horror fans. By this time, she wanted to become a mother and cut back on her career. But Moore’s career had found worldwide success and he didn’t think the time was right for raising children. This and their increasing time spent apart took a toll, and they subsequently divorced. However, their marriage ended amicably and they remained good friends for the remainder of his life. She continued to work through the 1970’s, mostly as threatened heroines in violent horror films of uneven quality. She soon found herself in a professional rut in an industry that wasn’t all that important to her. She remarried and settled into a private life, concentrating on her marriage and raising their child. She did briefly return to the public eye in 2002, when she hosted a memorial service for her late former husband, Moore, who was friends not only with her but her current husband, as well, even giving their daughter piano lessons.
Her daughter, Elodie Harper, is a journalist with the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Gayle Hunnicutt was born in Forth Worth, Texas and was a fashion model before she became an actress. She had her first major role opposite George Peppard in “P.J.” and then 1970 she settled in England after her marriage to actor David Hemmings. She made a number of films with him including “Running Scared”. She starred opposite Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Paul Scofield in “Scorpio” in 1973. Between 1989 and 1991 she returned to the U.S. to play a love interest of Larry Hagman in “Dallas”. Article on Gayle Hunnicut in “MailOnline” here.
Article in “Daily Telegraph”:
By Richard Eden
Gayle Hunnicutt, who told Mandrake in 2008 that she had initiated divorce proceedings against Sir Simon Jenkins, the chairman of the National Trust, after a 30-year marriage, has a reason to smile again. The glamorous actress is enjoying an emotional reunion with the BBC tennis commentator Richard Evans, who was her boyfriend until the year before she married Sir Simon.
Shadowman, poster, (aka NUITS ROUGES), US poster, Gert Frobe (left), Gayle Hunnicutt (right), 1974. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
“I am spending quite a lot of time with this lovely man in Florida,” she told me at the launch of the paperback edition of Miranda Seymour’s bookChaplin’s Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill, at The House of Hardy Amies in Savile Row, London. “It is lovely being with someone who knows you so well and understands you.
“We first met in 1975 and were together for two and a half years. As he is in the tennis world, he travels constantly. I had a career and a child to raise, so I couldn’t always be travelling around the world and we never married.” Hunnicutt, 67, was previously married to David Hemmings, the late star of the cult Sixties film Blow-Up. She added of Evans: “The person who introduced us in 1975 reintroduced us last summer. We both became separated and neither of us knew. It is one of those extraordinary things.”
Gayle Hunnicutt died in 2023
The Telegraph obituary in 2023:
Gayle Hunnicutt, who has died aged 80, was a strikingly glamorous American actress better known for her appearances in gossip columns than for most of her films, having divorced the wayward young British star David Hemmings in 1974 and married the writer and journalist Simon Jenkins.
Cast as elegant sexpots in thrillers like Marlowe (1969) with James Garner, Fragment of Fear (1970), her first British film, in which she co-starred with Hemmings, and Michael Winner’s spy caper Scorpio (1973), Gayle Hunnicutt dazzled with her inordinate good looks.
Gayle Hunnicutt in London, circa 1980 CREDIT: Terry Fincher/Popperfoto via Getty Images
The Telegraph’s critic Richard Last was agog as he ascribed to her “the most luminously beautiful face on television”, while an equally appreciative Clive James, gazing on her ravishing Titian hair and porcelain complexion, was smitten by her “sweet violence to the eye”.
There were others for whom the mere mention of her exotic name suggested a character who had stepped from the pages of an Ian Fleming novel; indeed, in 1972 she was canvassed as a Bond girl opposite Roger Moore in Live and Let Die, but it was not to be.
In the late 1980s millions saw her make a splash on British television as JR Ewing’s old flame, an English countess called Vanessa Beaumont, in the glitzy American soap Dallas.
Gayle Hunnicut with husband David Hemmings arrive at a party in Los Angeles, circa 1968 CREDIT: Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Had she remained in Hollywood rather than marrying David Hemmings and moving to London in 1968, she would probably have had a more illustrious film career, but she considered herself lucky to escape.
In Britain she sought to establish herself as a serious actress, and in the 1970s featured on television in costume dramas including an adaptation of Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Colette’s The Ripening Seed (both 1973) and as Tsarina Alexandra in the classic serial Fall of Eagles (1974).
Offers of film parts continued to flow and she was busy on the stage, too, appearing in productions of Shakespeare and Shaw and in lighter fare such as revivals of Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (Oxford Playhouse, 1981) and Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife (Albery, 1987), in which she co-starred with Martin Shaw.
In 1993, with her second husband, the cerebral Simon Jenkins, once described as “the acceptable face of fogeyism”, she hosted a joint 50th birthday celebration at St James’s Palace, previous venues for their annual extravaganzas having included Battersea Power Station and the Science Museum.
Gayle Hunnicutt with her husband Simon Jenkins, then editor of The Evening Standard CREDIT: Monitor Press Features Limited
Sir Christopher Bland, chairman of London Weekend Television and a future chairman of the BBC, used the occasion to make mischief, spreading a story that Gayle Hunnicutt and Jenkins had spent their wedding night at Henry James’s old home, Lamb House at Rye, reading Middlemarch.
The disintegration of her first marriage put paid to her appearance as Thérèse Raquin in Michael Voysey’s stage adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel of that name at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford in August 1974.
She pulled out a couple of days before the play opened, explaining that she was suffering from laryngitis, but her “indisposition” coincided with her final split from the serially unfaithful Hemmings, who was reportedly being “consoled” by his secretary, Prudence de Casembroot, 26.
The only child of a US Army colonel, Virginia Gayle Hunnicutt was born on February 6 1943 in Fort Worth, Texas. When the family moved to Beverly Hills in the mid-1950s, she won a scholarship to the University of California in Los Angeles, as near to Hollywood as a student of English and drama could get, and dabbled in acting during the summer holidays.
With Hermings in Fragment of Fear CREDIT: Film Stills
Her break came when a Warner Brothers talent scout spotted her in a student production, and after graduating with a BA in English Literature she made her first film, The Wild Angels, with Peter Fonda in 1966, followed by New Face in Hell starring George Peppard. In the same year she was cast on American television in two episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies.
In 1967, at a beach party for Steve McQueen thrown by the Rat Pack member Peter Lawford in Santa Monica, she met David Hemmings, the British actor who had rocketed to international stardom in Michelangelo Antonioni’s quintessential Swinging London film Blow-Up, and followed him to Turkey, where he was shooting The Charge of the Light Brigade. They married in Beverly Hills the following year.
When her marriage to Hemmings broke up in the mid-1970s, she decided to remain in Britain and “its wonderful, wonderful theatres”. She was cast in Twelfth Night at Greenwich, The Tempest at Oxford, A Woman of No Importance at Chichester and JM Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, also at Greenwich. In 1979 she became the first American actress to play Peter Pan in the West End.
With James Garner in Marlowe, 1968 CREDIT: Alamy
Her tight schedule continued throughout the 1980s, with stand-out projects including the role of the retired opera singer and femme fatale Irene Adler, opposite Jeremy Brett, in the first episode (“A Scandal in Bohemia”) of the ITV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1984 and the following year taking the female lead in Arthur Penn’s action adventure film Target (1985) opposite Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon.
In one of her last West End roles, aged 52, she donned a stunning backless evening dress in a revival of JB Priestley’s psychological thriller Dangerous Corner (Whitehall, 1995). She once said she did not wish to be remembered as “a lady Texan starlet with a good face”, and as an actress she was always memorable, even if unstretched; the suspicion lingered that her potential was never thoroughly explored.
At their Victorian home in Primrose Hill, north London, she became a notable social asset to her second husband, especially following his appointment as editor of The Times in 1990. “Simon is part of the Establishment,” she declared, “and as his wife, I am too.”
She was the author of the books Health and Beauty in Motherhood (1984), and Dearest Virginia (2004), a collection of her father’s wartime letters written between 1942 and 1944.
With David Hemmings, Gayle Hunnicutt had a son, the actor Nolan Hemmings, named after the character Hemmings played in The Charge of the Light Brigade. After her divorce she married Simon Jenkins in 1978 and had a second son, Edward, who became a journalist. That marriage ended in 2009.
Jill Balcon was born in London in 1925. She was the daughter of the famed film producer Michael Balcon. She made her film debut in 1947 in “Nicholas Nickleby”and had a substantial role in “Good Time Girl” with Jean Kent. Her other films include “The Lost People” and “Highly Dangerous” with Margaret Lockwood. In 1951 Jill Balcon married the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. The actor Danel ay-Lewis is their son. Jill Balcon died in 2009.
Her obituary in “The Guardian”:
Jill Balcon, who has died aged 84, was celebrating her 23rd birthday and just beginning to make a name for herself as a film and stage actor when, on 3 January 1948, she appeared on the BBC radio programme Time for Verse, broadcast live on Sunday evenings. Her voice – a rich, expressive, finely modulated instrument – was already a favourite with listeners and was to remain so throughout her long life. In the studio she met a fellow contributor, the poet C Day-Lewis, whom she had worshipped from afar ever since he visited her boarding school, Roedean, in 1937 to judge a verse-speaking competition. That meeting in Broadcasting House was to change her life.
Balcon – pronounced, she would point out with typical precision, like Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, not an abbreviation of balcony — thought Day-Lewis had hardly noticed her, but soon afterwards he telephoned her at her Pimlico flat just as she was packing for a season with the Bristol Old Vic. He wanted her to join him in a poetry recital in Salisbury. She could not, but spent her whole time at Bristol wishing she had been able to say yes. “He had charm,” she later recalled, “in the original sense of the word – a kind of magical magnetism.”They met again later that year – at the English Festival of Spoken Poetry in London – and romance blossomed. Balcon was, said her great friend Natasha Spender, wife of the poet Stephen Spender, “strikingly beautiful, like the sort of beautiful woman you only see on a Greek vase”. Jacob Epstein was so taken by her looks that he asked her out of the blue if he could make a bronze sculpture of her head.
Their joy at finding one another was not shared by those around them. Day-Lewis was 21 years her senior and married. He had also been involved throughout the 1940s in a very public love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, one of the most celebrated women of her age. He was dividing his time between her home in Oxfordshire and his wife and two teenage sons in Dorset.
Balcon had few expectations of Day-Lewis, but, after a late night walk along the banks of the Thames, where they carved their initials on a tree outside George Eliot’s home on Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk, he told her wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Day- Lewis broke with both his wife and Lehmann in favour of Balcon. It caused both discarded women great pain. Mary Day-Lewis bore it stoically, but Lehmann blamed Balcon and made it plain that she would never recover from the blow.
Balcon’s father, Sir Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios, was not at his daughter’s wedding breakfast in 1951. He had been horrified when her name appeared on the front pages of the newspapers as the co-respondent in Day-Lewis’s divorce. Lady Balcon was afterwards able to see her daughter only at clandestine meetings in Hyde Park.None of this disapproval could detract from the bond of love and common interest that the newlyweds shared. They were soul mates. She had been passionate about poetry since childhood. He had first made his name in the 1930s as one of a group of leftist poets, collectively known as the Auden generation or MacSpaunday. But by the 1940s he had moved away from their political concerns to embrace wider themes and to earn a place in the English lyric tradition alongside his hero, Thomas Hardy.There followed many joint public performances of poetry – Day-Lewis’s and that of others they both admired such as Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. From 1968 until his early death in 1972 Day- Lewis was poet laureate, and the couple were familiar public faces in the world of the arts, supporting progressive causes.
In the early years of their romance, Balcon’s own career continued to thrive. At the Old Vic, she played Zenocrate to Donald Wolfit’s Tamburlaine in a rare revival of Christopher Marlowe’s play. It was part of a season directed by Tyrone Guthrie, which also saw her play Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, with two children – Tamasin, born in 1953, and a noted documentary maker and cookery writer, and, in 1957, Daniel, the Oscar-winning actor – she put family before work. The demands of home and husband meant she concentrated mainly on television roles and radio work because they placed more manageable demands on her time.
Day-Lewis’s infidelities caused her much pain, but their marriage endured. After his death from cancer, she took on the mantle of his editor, producing a collection of his posthumous poems in 1979, the complete set in 1992, and a selection to mark the centenary of his birth in 2004. She became the keeper of the flame and noted with wry amusement that he had once written a poem The Widow Interviewed. “Sometimes I think, God, I have become that relic.” She continued giving performances of his verse at festivals and events as well as dealing with a constant stream of visitors and letters about Day-Lewis and the poets of his generation. She remained frustrated by the refusal of the authorities at Westminster Abbey to grant him a place in Poets’ Corner, a usual but not guaranteed honour for poets laureate. Despite a letter of protest organised by the Royal Society of Literature in 2000, the dean refused even to give Balcon a reason for his refusal
Balcon was born in Westminster, the daughter of Michael Balcon and his wife Aileen. Her father advised her against the stage, but after Roedean school, in Brighton, she trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she came top in her year, much to his delight. She first caught the eye of critics as Madeline Bray in Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1947 screen version of Nicholas Nickleby. Major screen roles followed in film, including opposite Stewart Granger in Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), Good Time Girl (1948) with Jean Kent, and The Lost People (1950), but the stage was her passion. In her later television work, she had decent roles in The First Churchills (1969) and Elizabeth R (1971) to complement more bread-and-butter appearances in series such as The Sweeney and The Protectors. Her final professional engagement with her husband was as a reader (with Marius Goring and John Gielgud) in his television series on poetry, A Lasting Joy, recorded in their home weeks before his death and broadcast posthumously to great acclaim.
Late in her career, she enjoyed something of a renaissance, with substantial parts in Derek Jarman’s films Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1993), and as Lady Bracknell performing in the Wilde play within the film An Ideal Husband (1999). But the medium where she worked most happily until the end was radio, where her 60 years as a well-loved actress and broadcaster were celebrated by the BBC in 2003 with a specially commissioned play, Deadheading Roses, which also featured her son, Daniel.
With her children grown up, she retreated to the Hampshire countryside, where she shared a picture-postcard thatched cottage with a new partner, the military historian Antony Brett-James. After his death in 1984, she tended their exquisite garden, entertained with good humour and great generosity neighbours such as Alec and Merula Guinness, kept a watchful eye on her beloved grandchildren at nearby Bedales, and made a new generation of friends among writers — including those, such as Claire Tomalin, who were anxious that her golden voice should be the one featured on audio versions of their books. Her passion for poetry never diminished, as she demonstrated in a 2007 appearance as the castaway on Desert Island Discs. She continued to give recitals and remained in close contact with almost all of the distinguished British poets of the generations that followed Day-Lewis. “I have spent my entire life,” she reflected just short of her 80th birthday, “trying to interest people in poetry.” She is survived by her son and daughter.
The grand dame of English theater and a prolific screen actress, Gladys Cooper was one of the most revered performers of her generation. She began appearing as a photographic model as a child, and after her stage career began she became a popular pin-up postcard model for British troops during World War I. Her first film appearance was in the silent feature “The Eleventh Commandment” in 1913, but she continued acting on stage, earning notice for work in plays such as Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in 1938 at the Open Air Theatre. Her first important film role was in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” and she had a supporting role in Alexander Korda’s classic romance “That Hamilton Woman.” One of her most famous roles came in 1942 when she played the mother of Bette Davis’s character in the psychological drama “Now, Voyager”; both she and Davis earned Oscar nominations for their roles. Cooper remained a busy actress throughout the rest of the ’40s and ’50s and earned another Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work in the historical drama “The Song of Bernadette.” When the golden age of TV began, Cooper found steady work in classic dramatic shows like “Playhouse 90” and “Twilight Zone,” appearing in three episodes of Rod Serling’s sci-fi classic. Nearing the end of her career she had a starring role in the con-men sitcom “The Rogues” with co-star Charles Boyer, and played Mrs. Higgins in the film musical “My Fair Lady” earning plaudits–and awards–for both roles.
Jake Wood was born in 1972 in London. His first film role was in the 1985 film “Flesh and Blood”. He appeared in many television shows including “A Touch of Frost”, “Doc Martin” and “The Bill”. He is currently featuring as Max Branning in “Eastenders”. Interview on “Youtube” on “This Morning” here.
Helen Fraser was born in 1942 in Olham, Lancashire. She trained at RADAw with Tom Courtney and John Thaw. She starred in “Billy Liar” with Tom Courtney and Julie Christie in 1963. Over 40 years later she starred with Tom Courtney again as the parents of dozy Dave in a Christmas special of “The Royle Family”. She starred in “Bad Girls” from 1999 to 2006.
Interview with Helen Fraser on EADT24:
She’s been touring in Calendar Girls, played the villain in panto, played Timothy West’s widow in Coronation Street – and moved house.
When I arrive at her new home in Eye, she apologises for the way the house looks. It looks fine to me but she explains: “I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to sort things out properly. I’ve been here for months but what with Calendar Girls and Corrie I haven’t been home long enough to put things where I want them. Everything is still pretty much where the removal men left them.”
With a busy summer looming, it doesn’t look as if she will have much time to do anything to her new home before September.
At the moment the actress, who is best known for her role as tough prison warden Sylvia “Bodybag” Hollamby in Bad Girls, is dividing her time between preparing for her new one-woman show An Evening with Helen Fraser, which is touring over the summer, and promoting the restored re-release of Billy Liar, which has just been issued on Blu-Ray.
Her one-woman show will be weaving its way round Suffolk: it’s being staged in Aldeburgh by Alys Kihl’s Wonderful Beast company; Helen is then taking it to the Woolpit Festival, where she is patron, Diss Corn Hall, The Cut at Halesworth and ending up at the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, in the autumn.
“It’s crazy; life’s never been busier,” she says, putting down the phone from her agent, who has just rung to inquire how the interview with London newspaper Metro went the other day.
“They wanted to know what my five favourite films were. I was talking to this lovely person on the other end of the phone but he must have been very young because he didn’t seem to know anything I was talking about.”
Apart from Billy Liar – which occupies a special place in her heart not just because it’s a classic British film but because it was the film where she met her late husband, Oscar-winning soundman Peter Handford – her favourite film is Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, with Moira Shearer.
“This reporter on the other end hadn’t heard of it and was amazed I had chosen it. He asked me to explain when it was made and what it was about. There’s no reason, I suppose, why he should have heard of it. It’s fairly old but it’s not an obscure film and is frequently in top-10 film lists.
“For me it was a perfect film. As a young girl, growing up with dreams of being a ballet dancer, I could see my future up on the screen.”
Sadly the dreams Helen shared with her mother of becoming a star in the Festival Ballet were not to be.
“I had a Gypsy Rose Lee mother who was determined I was going on the stage. So I was sent to stage school at a fairly young age. I was a little show-off and she was determined I was going to make it as a dancer and get away from Oldham, where I was born and brought up.”
Helen spent her formative years at the Arts Educational School at Tring in Hertfordshire. “I remember telling everyone that my name was Victoria because I hated the name Helen. It’s funny what you remember.
“Putting my one-woman show together has triggered all sorts of memories and it takes me and the audience on a journey through my life. People say to me: ‘When did you know you wanted to be an actress? When did it all start?’ And if truth be told I had no choice in the matter. At the age of nine I was a boarder at the Arts Educational School at Tring.”
If Helen had a pushy mother, then Mum had an ally in Helen herself. Fired up with those images of Moira Shearer dancing like a woman possessed in The Red Shoes, Helen wanted a life on the stage almost as much as her mother wanted it for her.
But a dancer’s life was not for her. “In those days it was all very strict. You were measured and weighed; tested for suppleness; but I knew I wasn’t going to be a dancer.
“I wasn’t very supple and if I am honest I was a little podge. Coming from Oldham, suddenly let loose in the Hertfordshire countryside, all that fresh air, I developed an appetite. So they put me on the drama course and it was the best thing that they could have done. It was the era of the Rank Charm School. They liked to get you young. I got my Equity card at 15.
“I have been very fortunate. Apart from my two years at RADA, where I trained with John Thaw, John Hurt and Edward Fox, I haven’t done anything but work. I look back now and I think ‘How and why was I so lucky?’
“One of the things about satellite television, on channels like Gold they show all these old situation comedies and I keep popping up. I find myself thinking: ‘How many did I do?’ On The Buses, Doctor At Large, Man About The House, Rising Damp, they keep coming up.”
Helen Fraser first came to public attention in the mid-60s, when she played Tom Courtenay’s long-suffering girlfriend, Barbara, in John Schlesinger’s classic Billy Liar.
“I have lots of very fond memories of Billy Liar. It was a wonderful film and we were all so young, Tom, Julie Christie and myself. It really captured the spirit of the age.” But there are also personal memories as well as professional ones. It was on Billy Liar that Helen fell in love with the film’s sound-recordist, Peter Handford.
Peter had already worked with Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean, and was then making a name for himself as a specialist in the tricky business of location sound. He had already worked on other such ground-breaking movies as The Room At The Top; Saturday Night, Sunday Morning; The Entertainer and Tom Jones.
“It was one of those things that just happened. We were shooting the scene in the cemetery and it was the coldest day of the year. I was absolutely freezing and Peter, ever the gentleman, loaned me his coat in between takes. It was as simple as that. We both just fell for each other.
“We had a lot in common. We went to the ballet, theatre and the cinema together. He was very much in demand and was one of the key people in that English New Wave cinema pioneered by people like Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger.”
Helen is delighted that Billy Liar, what she calls their special film, is now being given a new lease of life on Blu-Ray.
The camera negatives and Peter’s sound have been cleaned up and it now looks as good as it did when it was premiered in 1963.
Another favourite of her late husband’s works is The Go-Between, made by Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter.
“That was another very special film. That was one of the first jobs he did after we moved to Suffolk. He was thrilled because they were shooting around Norwich and south Norfolk, and it meant that he could stay at home. Unfortunately, though, his car broke down and I remember having to drive him to all these different locations each day.
“This was long before sat nav – long before personal computers. It provided me with a crash course in the country roads of Suffolk. I got to know my way around very quickly.”
More recently, Helen firmly lodged herself in the nation’s consciousness as the mean-spirited Bodybag in Bad Girls, which ran for nine years.
It’s a role Helen loved, as she believes the villains are always the best parts – or at least more interesting characters to play.
The series also provided her with an unexpected opportunity to fulfil a personal ambition. “I had always wanted to be in a West End musical and it turned out that after the series finished there was such a lot of support for it that it was transformed into a musical.
“At first we didn’t think it would go into London because there wasn’t a theatre available, but then the Garrick became free and we were away. I even got a big showstopper number and a ballroom dance sequence, which was lovely.”
These stories and others like them form the backbone to her show, which is interspersed with songs from her previous show about the music hall star Vesta Victoria. She is accompanied by pianist Keith Monk, someone she discovered during her Christmas break at The White Lion.
He was playing during Christmas evening in the bar. “He played a couple of requests for New York, New York and Moon River right off the cuff and when he said he came from Ipswich I saw the stars aligning.
“I rather nervously asked whether he would be interested in accompanying me in my one-woman shows and he said he would be delighted – and he is absolutely brilliant.”
She has added some songs to the evening to provide some variation. “It would be too much if it was just the spoken word all evening. So I have put in a couple of my favourite Vesta Victoria songs from my previous show and then I do Adelaide’s Lament from Guys and Dolls – it’s my favourite number from that show.”
This year has already been extraordinarily busy for someone who is wanting to calm things down a bit.
The tail end of last year saw Helen on a 16-week tour with Calendar Girls which finished just before Christmas in Dundee. With just a brief pause to book herself into a hotel with friends for Christmas, the New Year then arrived, with an offer of a juicy guest role on Coronation Street – an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“I wasn’t really looking for anything at that point but my agent rings and says they want you for Coronation Street. The icing on the cake was that my scenes were with Sue Johnston, who I knew from my guest role on The Royale Family.
“Her character had been going out with Timothy West, who had just died, and she knew he had a bit of money because he was in vinyl flooring.
“The solicitor tells her he wants to meet her in The Rover’s Return and she thinks she’s come into some money. However, when he arrives, he says: ‘Sorry I’m late; I had to pick up Doris,’ and steps aside and I’m standing there.
“She says: ‘Are you a relative?’ I just smile and say: ‘You could say that, luv. I’m his wife.’ It was a lovely scene to do. It is what Coronation Street does so well and it was lovely for me because I got such wonderful feedback from being on it.”
Helen has enough stories to fill several evenings and has had a long history with Suffolk, having moved here in 1969. She has worked at the Wolsey and Colchester Mercury theatres, and the old Eye Theatre.
So, being an experienced actress who has shepherded many young hopefuls into the profession in Bad Girls, does she have a heroine or a role model? “Oh, I love Judi Dench. I have always admired her, but I saw Skyfall the other day and she is just amazing. The expressions on her face were wonderful. You’re used to her being bossy and in charge, but her reactions when she was trapped and frightened were incredible. What goes across her face is just indescribable – you get waves of fleeting thoughts and emotions. She’s brilliant.”
An Evening With Helen Fraser is at The Woolpit Festival on June 9; The Cut, Halesworth, on July 21; Diss Corn Hall, July 28 and at the New Wolsey Theatre on Saturday October 26.
The article can also be accessed online on the EADT24 website here.
Jean Marsh was born in London in 1934. She started her acting career on the stage. Her first film was “The Limping Man” in 1953. Throughout the 50’s and 60′ she guest starred in many of the television series of the day. In 1959 she went to Hollywood where she woked on television including an episode of “The Twilight Zone”. In 1971 she and her friend Eileen Atkins originated the concept for a television series based on the experiences of their parents who had worked in service in some of the garnd houses in England. Thus “Upstairs, Downstairs” was born. The series was hughely successful both in Britain and in the U.S. Jean Marsh played Rose the upstairs parlor maidn who eventually became the ladies maid. The series ran until 1974. hen then went to the U.S. where she acted in films and television in Hollywood and on the stage on Broadway. She returned to Britain to make the film “Willow”. jean Marsh is also a published novelist.
TCM Overview:
A genuine class act, Jean Marsh won raves in her native England and on American soil for taking on nuanced roles onscreen. The Emmy Award-winning actress first made her mark in British productions, from Shakespearean stage revivals, to sci-fi epics, to costume dramas. However, it was Marshâ¿¿s breakout performance on “Upstairs, Downstairs” (ITV, 1971-75), a period drama series she also created, that earned the actress favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Her role as a prim and proper housemaid to an aristocratic British family won Marsh an Emmy in 1975, establishing her presence in Hollywood. She parlayed her success on British television into big screen projects, often playing the villain in feature films such as “Return to Oz” (1985) and “Willow” (1985). In 2010, Marsh starred on the three-part revival of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” which garnered more critical praise and gave her the opportunity to reprise one of the best characters in her long revered career.
Jean Lyndsay Torren Marsh was born on July 1, 1934 in the Stoke Newington district in London, England. Her father was a printerâ¿¿s assistant and maintenance man, while her mother worked as a dresser for the theater and also tended a bar. Marsh studied acting and mime as a child before taking her first steps in the entertainment business as a cabaret singer, model and dancer. She first graced the Broadway stage in a 1950s production of “Much Ado About Nothing” with acclaimed British actor, director and producer John Gielgud. Marsh made her onscreen acting debut in the made-for-television movie “The Infinite Shoeblack” (BBC, 1952).
The actressâ¿¿ early career consisted of several appearances on television, from playing a female robot in an episode of “The Twilight Zone” (CBS, 1959-1964), to appearing on “Walt Disneyâ¿¿s Wonderful World of Color” (ABC, 1954-1961; NBC, 1961-1981; CBS, 1981-83; ABC, 1986-88; NBC, 1988-1990) and “I Spy” (NBC, 1965-68). Yet it was on British television where Marsh established her career with recurring roles on the original installment of the long-running science fiction drama “Doctor Who” (BBC, 1963-1989). She first appeared on the series in 1965 as a medieval crusader and continued to guest star until 1989.
In 1971, Marsh and fellow British actress Eileen Atkins created the drama series “Upstairs, Downstairs” about a wealthy family living in London and the housemaids who served them. Marsh played Rose Buck, the head parlor maid of an aristocratic household. Playing the prim and proper servant earned the actress an Emmy Award in 1975 for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, a category she was also nominated for in 1974 and 1976. Additionally, she was nominated twice (1975 and 1977) for her work on “Upstairs, Downstairs” in the Best TV Actress
Drama category at the Golden Globe Awards. After several guest appearances on American television, Marsh landed a supporting role on the short-lived comedy series “Nine to Five” (ABC, 1982-83). Based on the 1980 film of the same name, “Nine to Five” followed three friends (Rachel Dennison, Valerie Curtin and Sally Struthers) as they navigated their careers, friendship, and love lives in the corporate world.
The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.
The telegraph obituary in 2025.
Jean Marsh, who has died aged 90, co-created the historical domestic drama Upstairs Downstairs, and starred as the parlourmaid Rose Buck, a role that bridged three decades in her acting career.
The show was the joint creation of Jean Marsh and Dame Eileen Atkins, a close friend and fellow actress who, like her, came from a working-class background. The feline, green-eyed Jean Marsh was then in her mid-thirties, out of work, almost penniless and of no fixed address.
The pair accepted a job as house-sitters in the south of France, where they colluded on possible scenarios for a television series that could depict the working classes fairly. “We still had giant-sized chips on our shoulders,” she recalled, and she was irritated by grandee roles. (“I’ve got the sort of facial bone structure that is supposed to make a good duchess. They never cast girls with fat faces as duchesses.”). They toyed with the idea of a drama focusing on the domestic staff of a household: “About that time, in 1967, The Forsyte Saga was on and we kept asking: ‘Who does the laundry in their house? Who does the cooking?’”.
Back in England, and despairing of any further progress, Jean Marsh called a television producer to pitch the idea. Within a few days London Weekend Television had signed up the series, and production began in less than three months, with Jean Marsh plundering Mrs Beeton’s Household Management for background. Master tapes spent almost a year in storage before finally being broadcast – in black and white – on October 10 1971. Soon, LWT executives realised that they had a hit on their hands.
Running for 68 episodes from 1971 to 1975, Upstairs Downstairs drew audiences of 30 million and was sold to 80 countries. In her role as Rose, plucky and generous head housemaid at 165 Eaton Place, Jean Marsh received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, and claimed to have been sent greater quantities of lustful fan mail “than the beautiful girls on the show”.
The series won two Baftas and a Golden Globe. There were spin-off novels, a spin-off television serial Thomas and Sarah (1979), a magazine and a cookbook. Gerald Clarke, of Time magazine, called it “the most exalted soap opera ever to be shown on TV”.
Jean Marsh was born on July 1 1934 in Stoke Newington, north-east London. Her mother, Emmeline, worked as a housemaid in a pub hotel; her father Henry was an outdoor maintenance man and printer’s assistant.
The family were creative and largely self-taught. Henry Marsh learnt to play the piano by ear, and when the young Jean fell ill with nervous paralysis, the parents enrolled her in ballet lessons as treatment. These were followed by classes in piano, singing and mime.
As she told The Guardian in 1972: “If you were very working class in those days, you weren’t going to think of a career in science. You either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworths.”
She left school at the age of 15 and began working as a dancer for film. Her first onscreen appearance was in Happy Go Lovely (1951), and she was the principal dancer in Where’s Charley? (1952).
From 1956 she began a steady career in television, including a role as a robot in an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959), and co-starred alongside Laurence Oliver in the American television adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1959). That year she also made her Broadway debut in John Gielgud’s Much Ado About Nothing.
From 1965 she took various roles in Doctor Who: first as Princess Joanna of England in The Crusade, then as Sara Kingdom, a short-lived companion of William Hartnell’s Doctor who was clad in a “fabulously ridiculous” catsuit of tight-brown tweed, before being hit by a ray gun that aged her to death. In 1989 she returned opposite Sylvester McCoy as Morgaine, the chief villain in the Arthurian story Battlefield.
On the big screen, she put in a brief appearance as Octavia in Joseph Mankiewicz’s vast historical epic, Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
The hapless production proved so monumentally expensive that it made a loss despite grossing more than $50 million. Feelings ran high, and Jean recalled an atmosphere that was “so extravagant, so louche, it affected everyone’s lives. Richard and Elizabeth weren’t the only people who had an affair.”
Away from Upstairs Downstairs she secured a key role in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), as the secretary who finds her boss strangled to death. She negotiated a break from her contract with LWT to appear on the New York stage, in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus (1975).
When Upstairs Downstairs finished later that year she returned to America, playing Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest as well as the sophisticated lead – also called Gwendolen – in the West Coast premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (in repertory together, 1977), and opposite Tom Conti in Whose Life Is It Anyway (1979) on Broadway.
Despite the widespread popularity of Rose Buck, some of Jean Marsh’s most memorable work was in science fiction and fantasy. Return to Oz (1985) was a dark adventure film based on the work of L Frank Baum (creator of The Wizard of Oz), in which Jean played the dual role of a brutal psychiatric nurse and a witch with a detachable head.
For the effects-laden Willow (1988), directed by Ron Howard, she was enveloped in rubber latex and warts. Make-up took five hours a day and the dust and smoke machines gave her bronchitis, but she maintained that it was “huge fun. I used to walk down the street, and kids would run away from me.”
She and Eileen Atkins joined forces once again in 1992 for The House of Eliott, the story of two sisters in 1920s London who establish a dressmaking business. The following year Jean published her first novel, inspired by her work on the series, under the same title. Her later novels included Iris (2000), and Fiennders Abbey (2011).
In 2009 the BBC commissioned a revival of Upstairs Downstairs, to star Keeley Hawes and Ed Stoppard. The first episode aired at Christmas the following year, now set in 1936, six years after the original series had concluded.
Jean Marsh reprised her role as Rose Buck, with Eileen Atkins playing an “upstairs” character, the redoubtable Lady Maud Holland. Neither was involved on the scripts, and Eileen Atkins departed after the first series. In 2011, as the second series was due to begin filming, Jean Marsh suffered a minor stroke, curtailing her involvement on the show, which was subsequently cancelled.
She was an ardent Francophile, who would translate articles from Le Monde into English, then the next day translate them back into French, to see how far she had drifted from the original.
Jean Marsh married, in 1955, the actor Jon Pertwee. They divorced in 1960. Though she lived with Albert Finney and Kenneth Haigh, both actors, and was in a 10-year relationship with the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, she never remarried.
Jean Marsh was appointed OBE in 2012 for services to drama.
Hermione Baddeley was born in 1906 in Shropshire. Her older sister was the actress Angela Baddeley. She appeared in many British films throughout the 1940’s and 50’s including “Brighton Rock” and”Room at the Top” for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She then went to Hollywood and acted in such films as “Midnight Lace”, “Mary Poppins”, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and “THe Happiest Millionaire”, In the 1970’s she scored as the housekeeper in the comedy series “Maude” at the same time as her sister was starring in Britain as Mrs Bridges in “Upstairs, Downstairs”.
Her obituary in “The Times”:
Mistress of revue who never lost talent for straight acting
Hermione Baddeley, actress, who died on August 19 at the age of 79, began her career as a girl of precocious dramatic power, in her early teens, and went on to be an unexampled artist in the flowering intimate revue. There, she was irrepressible, with a virtuosity never richer than in the Herbert Farjeon productions at the Little Theatre during the late 1930s.
She knew everything about rapid make-up and the use of properties. Though she held to the Farjeon texts, in later years she could be unpredictable. A partner, Henry Kendall, recalled that again and again he had to stand shaking with laughter, his back to the audience, hoping for some cue that would return him to the script. Though she often acted in films, Hermione Baddeley was happiest in the theatre, developing from what Basil Dean described as a small child, dark and thin, with large eyes set in an impish face, to the ample and exuberant “Totie”, rarely the same in consecutive scenes. Yet, mistress of revue though she was, and in her heyday so socially fashionable that someone adapted to her Kipling’s line, “I am Town; I am all that ever went with evening dress,” she longed to become again the straight actress that she was originally.
Born in Shropshire on November 13, 1906, youngest of four sisters – of whom her immediate senior was the very successful actress, Angela Baddeley – she was educated privately and at an early age joined the Margaret Morris School of Dancing. Then she travelled for three years with the Arts League of Service She had a few small parts in Lndon before her overwhelming success under Basil Dean’s management, as the disorderly slum waif in Charles McEvoy’s “The Likes of ‘er” (1923). In this she had the celebrated scene where, as a curative exercise, the girl is encouraged to smash apile of china plates. Presently for Dean, also at the St Martin’s(1924), she was the murderous young half-caste in Galsworthy’s “The Forest”. When everyone was seeing her as the dramatic actress of the future she defected to revue: “The Punch Bowl” (Duke of York’s, 1924), “The Co-Optimists” (1925), and four productions by Cochran. Other things also: she was in a medley of comedies, farces and musicals from which the only valuable part to emerge was Sara in Bridie’s “Tobias and the Angel” (Westminster, 1932).
After a long run in “The Greeks Had a Word for it” (1934), with her sister Angela, revue largely possessed her: Beverley Nichols’s “Floodlight” (Saville, 1937), and especially in the Farjeon shows at the Little (1938-40). Off stage she was now intensely involved in the West End social round.
In “Nine Sharp” and “The Little Revue”, Herbert Farjeon’s wit was matched exactly to her bravura in such characters as the valetudinarian wintering at Torquay, a windmill girl in “Voila les Non-stop Nudes”, and an agitated ballerina. When she was ill, Farjeon had to engage, briefly, five understudies to cover her parts. So it went on:partnership with the more astringent Hermione Gingold in “Rise Above It” (Comedy 1941); her work in Leslie Henson’s “The Gaities” (Winter Garden, 1945) after a long period with him abroad entertaining the troops for ENSA; and, in 1948, Alan Melville’s “A La Carte” (Savoy). Occasionally, before this, she had contrived to return to the straight theatre, as the warm-hearted Ida Arnold in a version of “Brighton Rock” (1943) and a double role in “Grand National Night” (1946). During 1949, she and Gingold amused themselves briskly in the revived “Fallen Angels”, behaviour which the author, Noel Coward, seeing in Plymouth thought intolerable but to which, when it did well in London, he gave a polite blessing. Hermione Baddeley found nothing important in various plays of the 1950s, but in 1953 she had her last revue triumph, a production called in Hammersmith “At the Lyric”, and at the St Martin’s “Going To Town”.
Here, a housewife, television-bemused, she could cope with domestic affairs only during a “technical hitch”. On her New York debut in 1961, she was the mother in “A Taste of Honey”; at the Spoleto Festival, Italy (1962) and on Broadway (1963) critics praised her moving creation of Flora Goforth, blend of bitter sadness and high comedy, in Tennessee Williams’s “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore”. She came back to London in 1966 to take over the radio actress in “The Killing of Sister George”, transferred to her mascot theatre, the St Martin’s. She had two other testing London parts: the appalling Mrs Peachum of “The Threepenny Opera” (1972), and the mother in a revived and far too verbose piece, “Mother Adam” (1973), at Hampstead. Later, she worked generally in Hollywood and for American television, but in 1982 she was on Broadway in Anthony Shaffer’s play “Whodunnit”.
She had made her film debut in “Guns of Loos” in 1928, and thought he cinema came second to her stage career she was often effective in character parts, exploiting her gift for comedy and making a speciality of cheery, lower-class women. During the 1940s and early 1950s she was in such films as “Kipps”, “Brighton Rock” (repeating her stage role as Ida), “Passport to Pimlico”, “Quartet”, and “Scrooge”. She was nominated for an Oscar in 1959 for her portrayal as Elspeth, the actress friend of Simone Signoret, in “Room at the Top”. It was a comparatively small part which she made vivid. She was the housekeeper, Ellen, in “Mary Poppins”, and later films included “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and “The Black Windmill”. She became a familiar face on American television through her appearances in popular comedy shows like “Bewitched” and “Maude”. Her home during the last twenty years or so of her life was in Los Angeles, but she used to re-visit England at least once a year.
Hermione Baddeley
Both her marriages, to the Hon David Tennant and, later, to Captain J.H. Wills, MC, were dissolved. There was one son and one daughter from her first marriage. Her autobiography, “The Unsinkable Hermione Baddeley” (1984), was generously warm-hearted and cheerfully vague about dates.
Antony Sher was born in 1949 in Cape Town, South Africa. He came from a Lithuanian Jewish family. He came to Britain to study acting. He studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. His theatrical credis include “Richard the Third”, “Hello and Goodbye” and “Torch Song Trilogy”. On television he has great success in “The History of Man”. His film roles include “Three and Out”. In conversation at The National Theatre here.
His vivid and moving performances, including an Olivier award-winning Richard III, made Sher one of the world’s most respected theatre actors
Sher’s death was announced on Friday. Catherine Mallyon, RSC executive director and Erica Whyman, acting artistic director, said: “We are deeply saddened by this news and our thoughts and sincere condolences are with Greg, and with Antony’s family and their friends at this devastating time. Antony had a long association with the RSC and a hugely celebrated career on stage and screen.”
It is his vivid performances in productions over four decades with the RSC, many of them directed by Doran, which gained Sher his reputation as one of the great modern Shakespearean actors. In 1985 he won the Olivier award for a portrayal of Richard III on crutches, his image a striking realisation of the character’s description in the play as a “bottled spider”. For the same director, Bill Alexander, he played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Doran directed him as Macbeth and King Lear, and as Falstaff in Henry IV Parts I and II, and Iago in Othello. As Lear, performed between 2016 and 2018, he was praised as “unbearably moving” by the Guardian’s Michael Billington.
Olivier-winning ‘bottled spider’ … Antony Sher as Richard III in 1985. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Alamy
Sher played another great Shakespearean, Edmund Kean, in Sartre’s bio-drama Kean directed by Adrian Noble. But his range went well beyond the Bard. The 1985 Olivier award was given to him in honour of both his Richard III and his performance as a drag queen in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, enabling him to say in his acceptance speech: “I’m very happy to be the first actor to win an award for playing both a king and a queen.”
He was praised for his Cyrano de Bergerac and his Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, both with Doran and the RSC. He excelled as both Tartuffe and that play’s author, Molière (in a play by Bulgakov) in RSC shows. Lead roles as Brecht’s Arturo Ui and Kafka’s Joseph K came at the National Theatre. The real-life figures he portrayed included Freud in Terry Johnson’s play Hysteria at the Theatre Royal Bath and Primo Levi, both at the National Theatre (in a play Sher wrote himself) and on screen too.
Sher was born in 1949 in Cape Town, where his grandparents had moved after fleeing the Lithuanian pogroms. He revisited their journey in his novel Middlepost and returned to South Africa during his career with major theatre productions including The Tempest (playing Prospero), Titus Andronicus (in the title role) and Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, whose hero, said Sher, was as “uncomfortable in his own skin”.
He grew up fascinated by the performances of great Shakespearean actors – obsessively listening to an LP of Laurence Olivier’s Othello – and his understanding of drama was transformed by the plays of Harold Pinter. He arrived in London in 1968, at the age of 19. “I looked around me and I didn’t see any Jewish leading men in the classical theatre, so I thought it best to conceal my Jewishness,” he once said. “Also, I quickly became conscious of apartheid when I arrived here, and I didn’t want to be known as a white South African.” He concealed his sexuality in public, too, which meant “my entire identity was in the closet”.
Sher prepared one of Mick’s speeches from Pinter’s The Caretaker for his drama school tryouts but at his Rada audition “they urged me to seek a different career”. He studied instead with the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and gained early stage experience with the group Gay Sweatshop and at the Liverpool Everyman, playing Ringo in Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert.
While Sher’s principal commitment was to the stage, he could be seen regularly on TV (including in the series The History Man) and in films. He wrote plays and novels, the memoir Beside Myself and autobiographical accounts of some of his best known performances, including as Richard III and Falstaff, which opened up the craft of acting. Year of the Mad King: The King Lear Diaries won the Theatre Book prize in 2019. It featured a number of his own illustrations and Sher remained a passionate painter. He was knighted in 2000 for his services to the arts.
Sher and Doran entered into civil partnership on the first possible day of the new law, 21 December 2005, which he called “a great day for human rights”. The couple married in 2015.
His final roles on stage included that of a chilling torturer in Pinter’s One for the Road in the Pinter West End season, and in John Kani’s play Kunene and the King, which premiered in the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 2019, directed by Janice Honeyman. Its London run was curtailed by the first lockdown.
Sher’s love for language was always palpable in his performances. “To an actor, dialogue is like food,” he wrote in Year of the Fat Knight, his book about Falstaff. “You hold it in your mouth, you taste it. If it’s good dialogue the taste will be distinctive. If it’s Shakespeare dialogue, the taste will be Michelin-starred. Falstaff’s dialogue is immediately delicious: you’re munching on a very rich pudding indeed, savoury rather than sweet, probably not good for your health, but irresistible
