Emma Chambers dead: Dawn French and Richard Curtis lead tributes to Vicar of Dibley and Notting Hill star
'A tender, sweet, funny, unusual, loving human being'
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Your support makes all the difference.Dawn French, Hugh Grant, and Richard Curtis have been among those to pay tribute to Emma Chambers, who died aged 53.
French, who famously starred alongside the actor in the BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley, called Chambers a “unique and beautiful spark”
A statement released by Chamber’s agency over the weekend said: “Emma created a wealth of characters and an immense body of work. She brought laughter and joy to many, and will be greatly missed.” She reportedly died from natural causes on Wednesday evening.
Grant — who played Chambers’ on-screen sibling in Notting Hill — said the actor “was a hilarious and very warm person and of course a brilliant actress.”
The creator of Vicar of Dibley and writer of Notting Hill, Curtis, said: “She really was a great, great comedy performer and a very fine actress. And a tender, sweet, funny, unusual, loving human being.”
“I suppose I particularly remember those jokes at the end of each episode of The Vicar of Dibley,” he continued in a statement to EW. “They were always done right at the end of the recording — with no time left — and were big feats of complicated remembering, and she was always completely accurate, completely innocent, completely hilarious.
“She has that classic and hard-to-find combination of being very, very accurately funny, while also seeming to be very, very truthful and real.”
Others to pay tribute on Twitter include Notting Hill script supervisor Emma Freud, co-star James Dreyfus, and Presenter Jeremy Clarkson.
Born in Doncaster, Chambers trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in the 1980s, working in theatre for 10 years before her major TV break as Charity Pecksniff in a TV adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. She went on to have success as Alice Tinker in the BBC’s The Vicar of Dibley and as Honey romcom classic Notting Hill.
Chambers is survived by her husband, fellow actor Ian Dunn.
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