FENELLA FIELDING

(17 November 1927 - 11 September 2018)

The London-born actress Fenella Fielding, who has died aged 90 from complications following a stroke, was most famous for her deep and seductively sexy voice and the way she swooped up and down her vocal range, savouring every syllable and every possible double entendre. The daughter of Romanian and Lithuanian parents, Fenella began her career in amateur theatre and cabaret in the early 1950s, becoming popular in Peter Cook and Harold Pinter’s West End revue Pieces of Eight with Kenneth Williams. She was also a huge success in Sandy Wilson’s musical Valmouth. She appeared on television from 1957 and a year later made her debut (uncredited) in the film Sapphire, with Nigel Patrick. More TV included The Four Just Men, Danger Man, The Avengers, Comedy Playhouse and The Prisoner, in which she was the voice of the loudspeaker announcer, and she camped it up in stories by Saki and the farces of Feydeau. Fenella’s early films included Follow a Star with Norman Wisdom, Foxhole in Cairo with James Robertson Justice, No Love for Johnnie with Peter Finch, In the Doghouse with Leslie Phillips, three of the Doctor films and a pair of Carry Ons – Regardless and Screaming. Other films included Drop Dead Darling, Lock Up Your Daughters, Guest House Paradiso and the gay film Over the Edge (2011). She was also the voice of the Blue Queen in Dougal and the Blue Cat. More TV followed, including four series of the Uncle Jack children’s stories in which she played The Vixen. Another series, Conditions, is due to air in 2019. Over the years Fenella Fielding acted in plays by Ibsen, Shakespeare, Fielding, Vanbrugh, Chekhov, Wilde, Sheridan, Coward, Henry James etc. She did a one-woman show on Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh and was very good in her own play about the Duchess of Windsor. She did voice-work for a computer game and audiobooks, released an album of cover songs, old and recent, called The Savoy Sessions, and did readings from her autobiography Do You Mind If I Smoke?, one of her lines from Carry On Screaming. Fenella Fielding received the OBE in 2018 for services to drama and charity. She never married. Her brother Basil, Lord Feldman, survives her.

MICHAEL DARVELL