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It was once said of the actor Barbara Ferris, who has died aged 85, that she was the only one of Joan Littlewood’s girls at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in London, who started out working-class and ended up middle-class.
Her father had a milk round in Soho after the second world war. Barbara progressed from training at the Italia Conti stage school, to fashion modelling and dancing – in Cole Porter’s Can-Can and The Pajama Game, Bob Fosse’s first show as a choreographer – at the London Coliseum in 1954-55, to important roles in plays by Edward Bond and David Hare at the Royal Court. In 1966, she was in a starring role opposite Donald Sinden in Terence Frisby’s West End long-runner There’s a Girl in My Soup (her role in the subsequent film was taken by Goldie Hawn).
Along the way, she transformed herself from a blond, beehive hair-styled cockney “dolly bird” to an actor of real emotional and technical command, notably in John Boorman’s first feature film, Catch Us If You Can (1965) with the Dave Clark Five, a much-underrated movie, and in Interlude (1968), Kevin Billington’s remake of a US Douglas Sirk film, in which, as an arts reporter, she conducted a disruptive affair with a married maestro played by Oskar Werner.
The social mobility tag was applied when she married, in 1960, the film director and producer, John Quested, while appearing in cabaret at Winston’s Club, Mayfair. Her honeymoon was just one night in the Dorchester hotel, as she was about to make her professional stage debut with Littlewood in Stephen Lewis’s Sparrers Can’t Sing. The show transferred to the West End. She was up and running.
By the early 90s, Quested was both the owner and chairman of Goldcrest Films. Ferris’s career did not dry up exactly, but she retired by choice, to raise the couple’s family, and travel extensively with her husband’s work. They had houses in Ireland and Zurich and, in London, a Chelsea apartment.
The second of four children, Barbara was born in London, to Dorothy (nee Roth) and Roy Ferris. While at Italia Conti, she was already working as a teenager in TV commercials and pantomime, supplementing Roy’s income. Her younger sister, Liz, became a springboard diving champion, who won a bronze medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, before going on to be a doctor.
Barbara’s early television work included the groundbreaking pop music show Cool for Cats (1956), alongside Amanda Barrie and Una Stubbs, and a cockney barmaid, Nona Willis, at the Rovers Return in Coronation Street (1961); Nona left the Street after 10 episodes, because she didn’t understand the Lancastrian accents.
There was nothing cosy about her performance as Pam in Bond’s Saved (given under club conditions in 1965 – the Lord Chamberlain had censored it): an unaffectionate mother, glued to the television, of the baby stoned to death in a notorious scene; nor as the effervescent, spirited Moll, defying an “arranged marriage” in the teeming Jacobean comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in 1966. Both plays were at the Royal Court and directed by William Gaskill.
After There’s a Girl in My Soup, in which she managed a sort of beady frivolity, she was one of three liberated female teachers – the others were Anna Massey and Lynn Redgrave – in Hare’s first major success, Slag (1971); Mrs Elvsted in John Osborne’s adaptation of Hedda Gabler (with Jill Bennett and Brian Cox); and the hilarious spirit of a “new broom” in a chaotic pre-internet library in Michael Frayn’s Alphabetical Order (1975), playing opposite Billie Whitelaw’s humane confusion as a much-loved resident librarian.
The director of the Frayn play, Michael Rudman, took her into his Lyttelton-based National Theatre company for revivals of Somerset Maugham and JB Priestley before she returned to the West End as the boozy actor sister of Penelope Keith in Stanley Price’s Moving (1981); and as a sexually treacherous sister in Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings (1982) – having sex with said sister’s obtuse novelist husband (Nigel Havers) under a Christmas tree laden with presents and thereby setting off a gift-wrapped, loudly drumming teddy bear.
Her last major London appearances were as Mavis, a dance teacher, in Richard Harris’s suburban Chorus Line-type hit, Stepping Out (1984), in which she skilfully projected an uneasy blend of personal insecurity and dull professional competence, and in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound at the Greenwich Theatre in 1991, a rueful family comedy.
She was twice married to Richard Briers on screen: as a vicar’s wife in 18 episodes of the 1985 television sitcom All in Good Faith, and as Enid Washbrook in Michael Winner’s so-so movie based on Ayckbourn’s wonderful am-dram comedy, A Chorus of Disapproval (1989), featuring before-they-were-movie-stars super-suave Jeremy Irons and a sweaty, obsessive Anthony Hopkins.
Her last film, which she did because her old friend from Littlewood days, Victor Spinetti, was in it, was Peter Medak’s The Krays (1990). And she dabbled in fringe theatre, producing and financing two glorious little compilation shows at the King’s Head in Islington in 2002: Call Me Merman and Dorothy Fields Forever, paying tribute to the great Ethel and the unjustly forgotten lyricist Dorothy, both magically recreated by her friend Angela Richards.
Ferris, who loved playing golf, is survived by her husband and their children, Nicholas, Christopher and Catherine.
