Bettina Welch
Bettina Welch (born 1922 in New Zealand) was an Australia-based theatre and television actor with an imposing presence.
Her acting career began in her teenage years when she arrived in Sydney from New Zealand with her parents on holiday. In Sydney she won a competition that led to her being trained by the J C Williamson theatre company, and she began acting on Australian radio. Her training with J C Williamson led to a succession of theatre roles with the company.
During Robert Morley's Australian theatre tour in 1949 she played his young mistress in Edward My Son. Her other stage roles include Australian productions of Harvey with Joe E. Brown, Simon and Laura and Deep Blue Sea with Googie Withers and John McCallum, the lead role opposite Emrys Jones in Double Image, and a feature role with Sir Robert Helpmann in Nude with Violin. Welch then appeared as the enchantress Morgan le Fey in J C Williamson's production of Camelot in the early 1960s, a role she played for two and a half years. She subsequently took one of the four lead roles in four-handed comedy Any Wednesday, appeared in productions of There's A Girl in My Soup, The Bandwagon, played the nurse in Loot, appeared as the daughter Julie in A Delicate Balance, and took the lead role in a production of Wait Until Dark, a role for which she was critically-acclaimed. Welch also played in Melbourne and Sydney in Hal Porter's Australian play Eden House. Through the 1960s she also guest starred in several Australian television drama series.
Despite her theatre background she became best known as scheming businesswoman Maggie Cameron in the television soap opera Number 96 from 1972. Her character emerged as a popular bitch-figure in the top-rated serial. In 1973 she left Number 96 temporarily to again act on stage opposite Robert Morley, this time in How the Other Half Loves.
Welch was spectacularly written out of Number 96 in late 1975 when it was revealed that the embittered Maggie had set a time bomb in the block of flats the series was set in, but she returned for a guest appearance in 1976 and in the show's final episode in 1977. She later had small featured roles in Australian film and television productions. She died in 1993.