Angela Baddeley
Angela Baddeley | |
|---|---|
 Angela_Baddeley, 1938 | |
| Born | Madeline Angela Clinton-Baddeley |
Angela Baddeley, CBE (4 July 1904 – 22 February 1976), born Madeline Angela Clinton-Baddeley, was an English actress best remembered for her role as Mrs Bridges in the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs. Baddeley also had a long and distinguished career on stage that lasted for 63 years.
Early life
Madeline Angela Clinton-Baddeley was born in London in 1904, the daughter of a wealthy family. She based the character of Mrs Bridges on one of the cooks her family had when she was a child.[1] Her younger sister was the actress Hermione Baddeley. In 1912, at the age of 8, Baddeley made her stage debut at the Dalston Palace in London in a play called The Dawn of Happiness.[1] When she was nine, Angela Baddeley auditioned at the Old Vic Theatre and in November 1915 she made her stage debut at the Old Vic in Richard III and appeared in many other Shakespeare plays.[1] During her teenage years, the "consummate little actress", as a national paper called had called her when she was 10, starred in many musicals and pantomimes.[1] She briefly 'retired' from acting at age 18. Her first marriage, to Stephen Thomas, produced one daughter. In c.1930 she married the actor and theatre director Glen Byam Shaw, and they had a son and a daughter.[1] In 1938, she appeared in King Vidor's film, The Citadel, an adaptation of A. J. Cronin's novel.
After spending some time touring in Australia, Baddeley succeeded in establishing herself as one of the most popular theatre actresses of her day, with roles in The Rising Stud and Marriage à la Mode. In 1931, she appeared in two popular movies, the Sherlock Holmes tale The Speckled Band, featuring Raymond Massey as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth, and in The Ghost Train, a large screen version of the hit stage thriller. Throughout the 1940s, she played many strong female roles on stage, including Miss Prue in 'Love for Love' and Nora in The Winslow Boy.
Later years
Continuing to act on stage, she played the bawd in Tony Richardson's production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1958. She was made a CBE in 1975 for "services to the theatre".[1] She died in London in 1976 of pneumonia at the age of 71, shortly after Upstairs, Downstairs had ended its original run. Had she lived it is likely that a spin-off series, with Baddeley reprising her role as Mrs. Bridges and Gordon Jackson returning as Mr Hudson, would have been made. This would have been set in the boarding house they had moved to at the end of Upstairs, Downstairs. Her last role was on the London stage in the second cast of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music.
She was the grandmother of Charles Hart, the lyricist of The Phantom of the Opera.
Selected filmography
- No Time for Tears (1957)