Stephanie Cole obituary: Beloved Open All Hours and Coronation Street actress
The actress Stephanie Cole, whose death at 84 was announced last week, was a star across multiple TV genres, from sitcoms like Waiting For God and Open All Hours, to the prisoner-of-war drama Tenko.
She could also be seen to great effect in light dramas like Doc Martin and Yorkshire TV’s A Bit Of A Do, starring David Jason and written by David Nobbs.
Ms Cole was a regular on Coronation Street, too, as Roy Cropper’s mother Sylvia Goodwin, between 2011 and 2013. She won the British Soap Award for best comedy performance for the role.
Born in Solihull, near Birmingham, she trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from 1958 to 1960 and like most actors of that time went on to work in repertory, making her stage debut at age 17 playing the 90-year-old Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. At age 63 she returned to the same role when the play was revived at the West End’s Savoy Theatre in 2004.
One of her most recognised and popular roles was of Dr Beatrice Mason in the BBC’s hugely popular Tenko drama, which chronicled the lives of British women in Singapore after the Japanese invasion and their consequent confinement in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp.
Cole played the role of the stern, officious yet kindly doctor known by the prisoners as Big Bea,over three series and a one off special between 1981 and 1985. Concurrently, she played the elderly paranoid and morose customer Delphine Featherstone (nicknamed The Black Widow) in Ronnie Barker’s Yorkshire-set comedy Open All Hours, written by Roy Clarke. Mrs Featherstone was the only rival to Nurse Gladys Emmanuel for the affections of Barker’s shopkeeper Arkwright, though she was only attracted to him because she liked his stinginess. The character’s advancing years belied the fact that Stephanie herself was only in her 40s.
In 1988 she joined the ranks of Thora Hird, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters and Patricia Routledge in Alan Bennett’s first series of Talking Heads, the series of dramatic monologues he wrote for BBC television. Stephanie would repeat her role of Muriel on the London stage.
Another of her best-known roles was of the crabby ex-photojournalist Diana Trent in the sitcom Waiting for God which ran from 1990 to 1994 and for which she was recognised at the British Comedy Awards.
In 2006 she Cole starred alongside Victoria Wood in the Bafta winning drama Housewife 49 as the local head of the Women’s Voluntary Service during the Second World War. In Doc Martin, meanwhile, she played the aunt of Martin Clunes’ title character.
On the West End stage she was in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in 1986, Steel Magnolias in 1989 and Ronald Harwood’s Quartet in 1999. But her most prominent stage role was as Betty in Kay Mellor’s comedy A Passionate Woman, directed by Ned Sherrin. On the last curtain call of the West End production Stephanie was surprised by Michael Aspel for This Is Your Life. She was awarded an OBE for her services to drama, elderly people and to mental health charities.
Her marriage in 1973 to writer Henry Marshall ended in 1988, after which she married actor Peter Birrell, whom she had met in their repertory days. He died in 2004 and Stephanie is survived by her daughter from her first marriage.