Barbara Kelly (5 October 1923 – 15 January 2007)[1] was a Canadian-British actress, best known for her television roles in the United Kingdom opposite her husband Bernard Braden in the 1950s and 1960s, and for many appearances as a panelist on the British version of What's My Line?
[4] Deeply unhappy at home, in 1942 she escaped to marry the actor and broadcaster Bernard Braden, and she soon did much radio work and toured across Canada in a stage show.
In the early 1950s, Kelly appeared in a few films including The Desert Hawk, A Tale of Five Cities, Castle in the Air, and Love in Pawn.
This ran for three years, although Kelly, who thought that the original show was never the same after the death of Gilbert Harding in 1960, felt that the revival did not match it either.
After retiring from show business, Kelly established a show business agency called 'Prime Performers', which offered many actors and people from public life, including Barbara Windsor, Joan Collins, Raymond Baxter, Norman Tebbit, and Sir John Harvey-Jones, for the after-dinner speaking circuit.
[3][5] In 2000, Kelly founded 'Speakerpower', a company that employed broadcasters and actors such as David Jacobs and Sylvia Syms,[6] to train corporate managers how to speak publicly.