Betty Marsden played Irene in the episode "Memories are made of this"

BETTY MARSDEN
Betty Marsden, actress, died on July 18 aged 79. She was born on February 24, 1919

BETTY MARSDEN was known and loved by countless radio listeners who never saw her face and might not have recognised her name. For hers was perhaps the funniest female voice on the airwaves in the 1960s golden age of British broadcast comedy - or rather hers were several of the funniest female voices.

As a mainstay of the popular 1960s series Beyond our Ken and Round the Horne, she created such memorable comic monsters as the incoherently theatrical Dame Celia Molestrangler, the hopeless Buttercup, world-weary Lady Beatrice Counterblast, and the gravel-voiced cookery expert Fanny Haddock. Even in a team that featured such talents as Kenneth Horne, magisterially deadpan, and Kenneth Williams, mannered to the point of hysteria, she was never in danger of being overshadowed. The programmes' winning blend of rude innuendo and riotous invention owed much of its success to her.

Betty Marsden was born to a poor family in Liverpool. Growing up on a Somerset council estate, at the age of six she was taken under the wing of a local music teacher, Betty Allen, who saw her potential as an entertainer and became her guardian. She gave recitals at garden fetes and Conservative Club social evenings, before making her stage debut at the Bath Pavilion at the age of 11, as a supporting fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her London debut came the following year, on December 26, 1931, as the Prince in a fairy play with music called The Windmill Man at the Victoria Palace. At 12 she won a scholarship to the Italia Conti stage school, where she studied for six years.

Her first big West End part came in September 1935, when she played Pamela in Closing at Sunrise at the Royalty. It was followed by leading roles in Basil Dean's production of Autumn at the St Martin's in 1937, in Ivor Novello's Comedienne at the Haymarket in 1938, and in a revival of J. B. Priestley's Johnson over Jordan at the Saville in March 1939. She also appeared at the Malvern Festival, before joining ENSA for the duration of the Second World War and entertaining the troops in productions which included Gaslight and In Good King Charles' Golden Days.

She acted in the bomb-damaged West End in 1943, in the American comedy Junior Miss at the Saville, and returned to it after the war with roles in Dr Angelus at the Phoenix in 1947 and Don't Listen Ladies at the St James's in 1948. Then, however, she turned her attention to revue. It proved an ideal outlet for her comic skills and engaging personality - offstage, she had long been known for her ability to make her fellow actors laugh.

Starting at the intimate Irving Theatre Club in London, she went on to enjoy success at the Edinburgh Festival in After the Show, and at the Royal Court in the long-running Airs on a Shoestring and its successor From Here and There. She played alongside Stanley Baxter in On the Brighter Side. Noel Coward was among those to form an enduring admiration of her talent.

Revue laid a perfect foundation for her radio work. "Comedy is acting," she once said, "real concentration." For a decade from 1958 she was an essential part of the most talented team in broadcast comedy. Together with Horne, Williams and Hugh Paddick, she brought to life the crowd of outrageous characters that tumbled from the pens of the writers Barry Took and Marty Feldman. The programmes won huge audiences and came to an end only on the death of Kenneth Horne in 1969. They retain a vast following even today. Marsden recognised the avant garde quality of the shows' humour, but she also loved their "ridiculous earthy simplicity".

She continued to take the occasional stage role while her radio fame was at its height, and she resumed her theatrical career with new enthusiasm in the 1970s. Throughout her career, she had shown an enormous appetite for work, and a willingness to make the best of even the most awful roles. Now, by and large, she began to get the sort of parts she deserved.

She played Lady Bracknell and appeared in Lindsay Anderson's revival of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw and in David Storey's farce Mother's Day at the Royal Court, though she also played in No Sex Please, We're British. More recently she was in Wind in the Willows and Trelawney of the Wells at the National Theatre.

Her first cinema role was in the flagwaving Ships with Wings in 1941. She followed it in the course of her career with parts in films that ranged from the Carry On series to Lindsay Anderson's blackly satirical Britannia Hospital. On television she appeared in Inspector Morse, The Bill, Casualty and The Darling Buds of May.

Betty Marsden was married for many years to Dr James Muggoch, a consultant anaesthetist with a passion for showbusiness and a talent for writing lyrics, which he did with some success under the pseudonym James Wilson. They had met on a troopship during the war, and after marrying in a bamboo hut in Nigeria made their home first in a beautiful Georgian house in Flask Walk in Hampstead, and then in an 82ft coal barge moored on the Thames near Kew Bridge. Dr Muggoch died in 1975, and Marsden is survived by their son and daughter.

George Logan & Patrick Fyffe (Hinge & Bracket)
Last modified: 05-Jun-2011 14:36