"I have spent most of my life working in the theatre - which is always my greatest love - but the films and television were the providers of the little luxuries of life."
The utterly marvellous Hermione Baddeley would have been 110 years old today...
Facts:
- She started her long acting career in the 1920s, but her big breakthrough was as 'Ida' in the classic film noir Brighton Rock in 1947.
- Her sister Angela was most famous for playing 'Mrs Bridges' in Upstairs Downstairs.
- Her first marriage was to the arch-decadent aesthete Stephen's brother The Hon. David Pax Tennant, socialite and BBC announcer; their first date was a double-date with none other than Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later HM The Queen Mother) and her escort.
- Miss Baddeley was teamed up with her inimitable namesake Hermione Gingold in Noël Coward's stage comedy Fallen Angels, though the two women were apparently "no longer on speaking terms" by the end of the run.
- Her 1961 LP A Taste Of Hermione Baddeley is notable for the presence of the rather brilliantly-titled track I Changed My Sex A Week Ago Today (a copy of which - inevitably! - we have in our collection here at Dolores Delargo Towers; it does not, however, appear to be anywhere on the interwebs now).
- After her success playing the maid in Mary Poppins, she had a lucrative career on US television, in such shows as Bewitched, Little House on the Prairie and Maude; she died at her home in Los Angeles.
