Joanne Campbell (1964-2002) British actress
Michael Rhodes
Joanne Campbell, actress, was born in Northampton on February 8, 1964.
She died in London from deep vein thrombosis on December 20, 2002,
aged 38.
Hailed as a role model for young black actors, Joanne Campbell
maintained a successful career as an actress, dancer and singer both
on stage and in television. She became widely recognised when she
starred in the Eighties television sitcom Me and My Girl, playing the
secretary Liz alongside Richard O'Sullivan. She appeared in other
light entertainment and children's shows on television — at the time
of her death she was shooting a children's show for BBC Two, U Get Me,
about an internet radio station — and had a cameo in the film Nuns on
the Run as a nurse, but Campbell's real forte was on stage. Starring
in numerous musicals, she infused each role with energy and obvious
enjoyment of the part.
Campbell was trained at the Arts Educational School in London, and
began her career as the lead role in Jack and the Beanstalk (1982) at
the Theatre Royal Stratford East, a part which was noticed as the
first black principal boy in British pantomime. She was to return to
the stage-boards of the Theatre Royal many times throughout her
career, eventually becoming a member of the board of directors for the
last ten years of her life. Her first lead role came in 1987 in the
musical This is My Dream. Campbell played Josephine Baker, star of the
Paris variety stage, a part which was written especially for her by
Henry Livings.
Performances as a radio commentator in Mama I Want to Sing and a lead
in The Cotton Club were praised, though the shows themselves did not
always receive critical applause; a reviewer of The Cotton Club
remarked that Campbell and her co-star Debbie Bishop "lead the
hardest-working cast in London . . . They're great when singing and
kicking up their heels but they have been lumbered with the most
offensive script in the West End."
Campbell also used her acting skills as a means of teaching. She was a
founder member of the BiBi crew, a group of seven black actresses who
wrote, produced and performed their own shows, portraying to a wide
audience the experience of being black in Britain. In the Nineties she
trained as a drama therapist, and worked at the Priory Hospital in
North London, primarily with children. She had also begun training to
qualify as a child and adolescent psychiatrist.