In 1957, after Slade and Reynolds had enjoyed considerable acclaim with Salad Days, Lewis and Patricia Bredin (who in the same year was the United Kingdom's first ever entrant to the Eurovision Song Contest) took the main female roles in their follow-up show, Free as Air, which opened at the Savoy Theatre in London on 6 June 1957 following an initial season in Manchester.
[7] A cast recording, which includes Lewis singing a solo number, "Nothing But Sea and Sky", duets with John Trevor ("Free as Air" and "I'd Like to Be Like You") and in a trio with Josephine Tewson and Gerald Harper ("Holiday Island"), was released on compact disc in 2007.
[3] In the early 1960s Lewis played extensively in repertory theatre in Bristol, appearing in, among many other productions, revivals of John Dighton's The Happiest Days of Your Life (1960) (based on his screenplay for the 1949 film starring Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford), Noël Coward's Private Lives (1960) and Blithe Spirit (1961)[11] and Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (1960).
In a short run,[14] Lewis took the feisty role of Claire (the part played by Ann Miller in the 1949 film and on Broadway by the show's librettist Betty Comden) alongside two American actresses, Andrea Jaffe and Carol Arthur.
[15] One view of Lewis's stage persona in the late '50s and early '60s is that she, Susan Hampshire and Anna Dawson, who all had leading roles in Slade musicals, "possessed an extraordinary Englishness of feature and bearing and voice that seems absolutely to have vanished from the theatre, perhaps from the world itself".
In the Avengers episode, "The Man-Eater of Surrey Green" (broadcast December 1965), she played Laura Burford, an old friend of Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) who was mysteriously lured away from scientific work alongside her tactile fiancé to a horticultural project aimed at propagating menacing bean-like plants with gigantic tendrils.
As Joyce Grant in The Baron ("So Dark the Night", broadcast 15 March 1967), her father died in a spooky country house just before the series' eponymous hero (Steve Forrest as John Mannering) and his glamorous assistant (Sue Lloyd as Cordelia Winfield) arrived to value some antiques.
[21] Over a series of 13 episodes produced and mostly written by Philip Mackie, Lewis portrayed Drusilla as a highly professional and, at first, rather prim, proper and somewhat icy[22] assistant who had been through finishing school, had a shorthand speed of 150 words per minute,[23] but was unable (so she always said) to make decent coffee.
[31] An enticing contrast with Drusilla's initial twinset image[32] was provided by a working cruise to South Africa on which she enjoyed a romance with a suave ex-jewel thief and Halifax teased her that she was displaying too much of her cleavage while relaxing on deck.