<Archive obituary> Irene Handl, actress (1901-87)
Michael Rhodes
<Times November 30, 1987>
IRENE HANDL
Classic Cockney of Comedy
Irene Handl, the comedy actress who made a speciality out of
warm-hearted Cockneys, died yesterday. She was 85.
She was getting on for 40 before she started acting but quickly made
her mark and had a long and fruitful career on the stage, in films and
on television. Small, dumpy and invariably cheerful, she took
naturally to comedy and will be remembered for her portrayals of maids
and charladies and dotty aunts.
Seh was also a successful novelist - a late starter here as well, her
first book not appearing until she was in her sixties.
Irene Handl was born in Maida Vale, London, on December 27, 1901. The
daughter of a Viennese banker and a French mother, she was educated at
a variety of schools and travelled widely in her youth. After her
mother's death she stayed at home to look after her father.
When she decided, at an advanced age for such things, to try for a
career on the stage, she trained at the Embassy School under Eileen
Thorndike (sister of Dame Sybil). She had an immediate success playing
the maid in the West End comedy "George and Margaret", which opened in
1937.
In time she played most of the classic comedy roles, from Mrs Malaprop
to Lady Brakcnell and her own favourite, the medium Madame Arcati in
Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit". But her biggest stage success was in
her more familiar guise as the lovable Cockney char in "Goodnight Mrs
Puffin", which ran for three years in the 1960s.
By then she had become a national figure through the cinema. She had
made her first film in 1938 and after a long apprenticeship in small
parts she came to the fore in comedies of the 1950s and 1960s like
"The Belles of St Trinians", "Brothers in Law", "I'm All Right Jack",
"The Rebel" (with Tony Hancock) and "Heavens Above". Her best film
parts were the disapproving wife of Peter Sellers's Communist shop
steward in "I'm All Right Jack" and the Marxist mother of David Warner
in "Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment".
In 1965 she surprised and delighted the publishing world with her
first novel, "The Sioux", the portrait of an aristocratic French
family, written with originality and insight and revealing a less
comfortable side to her personality than had been suggested by her
stage Cockneys. She had begun the first draft of the book when she was
14. For 40 years it lay untouched in a linen cupboard and was finally
pulled out during a long run of "Goodnight Mrs Puffin" - when she
decided that writing might be a good way of recharging her creative
batteries.
A sequel, "The Gold Tip Pfitzer", appeared to similar acclaim in 1973.
The climax of a busy career on television was the comedy series "For
the Love of Ada", in which she and Wilfred Pickles played an elderly
couple finding romance late in life. It rans for three years from 1970
and spawned a film, though its comedy did not transfer happily to the
large screen.
Her other television work included the children's comedies "Metal
Mickey" and "Supergran".
Irene Handl continued to make films, do television shows and even
appear in Christmas pantomimes until she was well into her eighties.
Unmarried, she usually had a chihuahua dog for a close companion, and
she had an unlikely passion for the records of Elvis Presley.
END.