Hattie Jacques
Her biographer, Frances Gray, considers Jacques had a "talent for larger-than-life comedy which never lost its grip on humanity", while she could also display "a broader comic mode" as a result of her "extraordinary versatility".
[3][a] The Jaques family were predominantly non-theatrical, with the exception of Mary who appeared in the small role of Harry Hathaway in the Christmas pantomime Robinson Crusoe at the Palace Theatre, Cologne, in 1920.
[10] Her biographer, Frances Gray, described the Players' as being Jacques's drama school, as she acted, directed, wrote lyrics and "developed the persona she was to use in pantomime for years, the large, bossy, but vulnerable fairy queen".
A member of the backstage staff compared her "blacked up" appearance with the American actress Hattie McDaniel, known for her work in Gone with the Wind, and Jacques adopted the name for the rest of her life.
[31] In August 1947 Ted Kavanagh, the scriptwriter of the BBC Home Service show It's That Man Again (ITMA), visited the Players' and invited Jacques to audition for the series, which she did on 18 September, for a fee of five guineas.
[26] Jacques joined the cast of ITMA as the greedy schoolgirl Sophie Tuckshop,[33] where she "would regale listeners with terrifying accounts of epic binges",[1] before finishing her stories with the catchphrase "But I'm alright now".
[27][40] Tommy Handley died suddenly on 9 January 1949; the BBC decided that he was "so much the keystone and embodiment of the actual performance" of ITMA, that they cancelled the show immediately.
Jacques played Alice, a welder: when she was offered her fee for 17 days filming, she replied "I've done this job welding Bailey and Pontoon Bridges and I know how hard it is.
[52] At the end of the series Jacques returned to the Players' to appear in the Christmas pantomime, Ali Baba and the Thirty-nine Thieves, which she and Joan Sterndale-Bennett had adapted after they had copied it out long-hand at the British Museum.
[45][f] In 1952 Jacques also portrayed Mrs Jenks in John Gilling's comedy horror film Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, co-starring Arthur Lucan and Bela Lugosi.
[62] Jacques became pregnant in 1952, but worked through most of her pregnancy, appearing in the Players' revue The Bells of St Martins between August and November 1952: she slid down the table and did the splits at the end[63]—something The Times thought was "especially good",[64] although The Manchester Guardian considered that she was "monumental of person but surprisingly thin of voice".
[65] Le Mesurier reported that he was "faintly relieved" when the revue came to an end because of her exertions,[66] added to which she appeared in the 27 episodes of the third series of Educating Archie between September 1952 and June 1953.
[91] She became known by the team as a "Mother Hen" figure,[92] and was a close friend to many of her co-stars, including Kenneth Williams and Joan Sims, whom Jacques provided with a great deal of advice and practical help.
[98][99] Although Jacques's role was still relatively small, she appeared in perhaps the best known scene of the film, in which she retrieves a daffodil from Wilfrid Hyde-White's buttocks, put there by a mischievous nurse as revenge for his constant harassment of the staff.
[103] Of the former film, Derek Prouse of The Sunday Times thought that Jacques "triumph[ed] over material so remorselessly juvenile that one is battered into a kind of fascinated admiration".
[107] Because of the success, Jacques and Sykes "became embedded in the public mind as a priceless comic partnership";[108] to capitalise, they released a comedy album entitled Eric and Hattie and Things!!
[109] In September 1960 she starred in her second television series, Our House, alongside Charles Hawtrey, Bernard Bresslaw and Joan Sims; Jacques played the librarian Georgina Ruddy, who was forced to keep quiet at work and so made up for it by being extremely noisy at home.
[122] In 1964 Le Mesurier moved out of the marital home,[123] made a decision to protect Jacques from any negative publicity, and allowed her to bring a divorce suit on grounds of his own infidelity.
[124] In 1964, as well as recording four episodes of the radio show Housewives' Choice, Jacques starred in her own television series, Miss Adventure, as the private investigator Stacey Smith.
[134] As such, Rogers cast Jacques as Matron, with Sims accepting a smaller role as the timid assistant of the film's lead character Francis Bigger, played by Frankie Howerd.
[141] Although 1969 had been busy, 1970 was relatively quiet in terms of her professional output: apart from an episode of Catweazle,[142] she appeared alongside Willoughby Goddard in a six-episode series of Charley's Grants.
She took a weekend break from hospital and returned home to Eardley Crescent, where on 6 October she died from a heart attack in her sleep at the age of 58; she was also suffering from kidney failure.
The other notable absentee from the funeral was Joan Sims, who "stayed in her home and spent the day drinking, reading old letters from Hattie and wallowing in self pity", according to Merriman.
[168] Kenneth Williams was deeply saddened by the loss of his friend, and wrote that "all the chums have died ... one is left marooned on the shore ... the tide is receding and leaving some incongruous wrecks exposed ...
[171] A month after the funeral, a memorial service was held at St Paul's, Covent Garden, otherwise known as the Actors' Church,[170] which was described by Le Mesurier as a "joyous occasion".
[173] In November 1995 a blue plaque was unveiled by Eric Sykes and Clive Dunn—a colleague from her Players' Theatre days—at her former house: 67 Eardley Crescent, Earls Court, London.
[1] As a singer she was also praised; Jonathan Cecil of The Spectator said that her "bell-tone voice with its cut-crystal diction—perfect for radio—had an edge of pain which suggested a greater depth to her talents than she was generally allowed to express".
[185] The actor Neville Phillips, who toured with Jacques, described her as having a "pretty voice" and able to "take an innocuous old Victorian or Edwardian ballad and with just a few intonations and expressions give it another meaning entirely".
An article in The Guardian by Mark Lawson mixed fiction with reality when he wrote that "standards of hygiene have slipped since Hattie Jacques ran NHS wards".
[186] Her friend Bob Monkhouse thought that her career was overshadowed by her size: "She was such a great comedienne ... everyone wanted her but the movers and shakers of entertainment didn't perceive her as anything other than a fat lady".
