Betty Baskcomb

Stalwart of stage, screen and the glory days of radio drama

Betty Violet Marie Baskcomb, actress: born London 30 May 1914; married 1940 Anthony Lehmann (died 1944; one daughter), 1948 Ronald Ward (died 1978); died West Wratting, Cambridgeshire 15 April 2003.

The actress Betty Baskcomb rarely headlined in the theatre, or in films. Even on the wireless, where her characterful tones fitted perfectly into the rich mix of voices, accents, and tonal timbres that constituted the BBC Drama Repertory Company during the glory years of radio drama – roughly the 1940s through the 1970s – her name hardly ever made it above the title in the Radio Times cast-listings. But she was seldom out of work.

From her first appearance on stage – at 17, as stooge in a sketch with her comic-actor father A.W. Baskcomb, at the London Colosseum in 1931 – to her final days on the radio, her seasoned tones perfectly cast by the producer Graham Gauld as those of the fey, arch and vaguely sinister fortune-teller and psychic Mrs Erdleigh in Frederick Bradnum's superlative adaptation of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time (1980-81), she made herself virtually indispensable as a grafting actress: she was willing to take on any role – chattering char, booming mother-of-the-bride, feline secretary, comically flummoxed fete-goer – and make the best of it she could.

Her success as a skilled and dependable wireless mummer may be gauged by the fact that, unusually, she was invited into the ranks of the radio Drama Rep three times: 1946-51, 1958-59, 1970-72 – thus representing, in a sense, youth, middle and old age.

Betty (her real name, not a familial reduction) Baskcomb was born in St John's Wood, London, in 1914 and haphazardly educated, mainly at a convent school in Cavendish Square. She left at 16, entering Rada, that first professional engagement at the Colosseum a few months later. Although her father suffered a near-fatal stroke in 1932, Baskcomb, through him, had by then far more experience of "the business" than her contemporaries at Rada and was already learning how to network.

During the early 1930s she earned a small but useful "day rate" income as an extra at various British film studios (including British Lion) which led to a small part in Alfred Hitchcock's original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) – which in turn, two decades later, led to Hitchcock's flying her over to Hollywood for the remake (1956, with James Stewart and Doris Day, and Bernard Miles and Brenda de Banzie cleverly cast against type as the kidnappers, Baskcomb an uncredited minion).

She first stepped into a BBC studio in 1936 – almost certainly never dreaming that nearly half a century later she would still be popping regularly into Portland Place to earn her keep – broadcasting a short handful of songs on the old Empire Service (having been taught to sing by Ivor Novello's mother).

Baskcomb started the Second World War in the Women's Auxiliary Fire Brigade, but was soon touring with Ensa, at the same time turning up in small parts on the radio (the first series of Ernest Dudley's Meet Dr Morelle, e.g., with the slightly raffish Dennis Arundell in the title role). She had married Anthony Lehmann in 1940, but he tragically lost his life four years later, and she was rescued from a breakdown by Robert Donat, who quickly gave her a tiny part in his lavish 1944 pantomime The Glass Slipper, then got the author, Eleanor Farjeon, to bump the part up and "give Betty something to take her mind off her troubles".

In 1953 she took part in Christopher Hassall's Coronation masque Out of the Whirlwind, with Fay Compton, which played in Westminster Abbey throughout the festivities. And over the next 20 years she had a succession of small parts in various successful West End productions, including Patrick Cargill's and Jack Beale's Ring for Catty, with Patrick McGoohan and Kathleen Harrison, at the Lyric in 1956; as the scheming Polish procuress Mrs Pimosz in Giles Cooper's Everything in the Garden, with Geraldine McEwan and Charles Gray, which transferred from the Arts to the Duke of York's in 1962; a touring version of Bill Naughton's hit Spring and Port Wine with Wensley Pithey; and a celebrated revival of Noël Coward's Hay Fever (as Clara the maid), with Celia Johnson and Roland Culver in 1968.

But in those post-war years it was also back to the BBC studios, now as a contracted player. She was in Margery Allingham's famous take on the Jack the Ripper sensation Room to Let (1947), with Laidman Browne and that doyenne of radio drama Gladys Young, and in the final year of her first Drama Rep contract (1951) she headlined in Mark Oliver's adaptation of Coward's This Happy Breed with Richard Purdell.

In the 1960s she was busy on the stage, at Broadcasting House, and also in the television studios, one of her performances (together with those of the rest of the cast) fixed for ever in John Russell Taylor's book Anatomy of a Television Play (1962), which featured an in-depth study, with stills, of Robert Fuller's ABC TV play Afternoon of a Nymph, with Ian Hendrie and Janet Munro (Baskcomb played Munro's mother).

It could be said that, in playing Mrs Erdleigh in Powell's Dance, Betty Baskcomb went out on a high note. Yet one of her finest performances was as the brazen barmaid who marries the Polish Count Skriczevinsky in Terence Rattigan's Flare Path (adapted as a Saturday Night Theatre in December 1965, with Basil Jones and Anthony Hall).

Baskcomb had something of a history playing barmaids of one kind or another (an early highspot was as the barmaid of the Two Compasses in that celebrated 1948 example of the British socio-realist movie It Always Rains on Sundays), but in Flare Path she surpassed herself, her good-time brassiness heartbreakingly dissolving into shock and then misery as she realises that her dead Polish husband truly loved her.

Jack Adrian