 Felicity Kendal is a daughter of the theatre, whose stage appearances have far outnumbered her screen roles.
However, during the 1970s and 1980s, with quietly controlled scripts and producers' sympathetic handling of actors, she created
some memorable television characters.
Spending the early part of her life as a travelling Shakespearean actor in
India and the Far East, where her parents ran a touring theatrical company, she
returned to Britain after appearing in Merchant-Ivory's Shakespeare-Wallah
(India, 1965), a film based on the family's experiences in India.
Although she was seen as 'bewitching' and 'pert' by contemporary reviewers
for her early television performances - one of the first being opposite Sir John
Gielgud in the bitter-sweet Wednesday Play comedy 'The Mayfly and the Frog'
(BBC, tx. 21/12/1966) - her elfin charm didn't really come to notice until The
Good Life (BBC, 1975-78).
One of the most popular programmes in the new 1970s BBC carefree sitcoms, The
Good Life featured Kendal and Richard Briers as a suburban couple who decide to
practice self-sufficiency and live off the land, much to the annoyance of their
disapproving middle-class neighbours Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith. The
characters, as in most well-crafted sitcoms - Kendal and Briers' warm and
amiable young couple, Eddington's easy-going husband to Keith's snobby matriarch
- were near enough (but not too near) to real life types with whom most viewers
could identify, with Kendal standing out as the epitome of friendly suburban
sexiness in her tight blue jeans.
After The Good Life, she made fleeting TV appearances - notably as Viola in
the BBC Television Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night (tx. 6/1/1980) -
until Carla Lane's comedy drama Solo (BBC, 1981-82). This was a strongly
feminist, war-of-the-sexes piece with Kendal as a self-assertive but doubtful,
competent yet insecure young woman who decides to reject her job, eject her
unfaithful boyfriend and go it alone.
Taking a step forward from her brink-of-adultery theme in the earlier
Butterflies (BBC, 1978-83), Lane constructed The Mistress (BBC, 1985; 1987),
featuring Kendal as a doggedly independent single woman who is also the mistress
of a married man.
The Camomile Lawn (Channel 4, 1992), a steamy upper-middle-class family saga
spanning several decades, infused with long, languorous sex scenes, was adapted
from Mary Wesley's 1984 novel. Screened initially in four parts, the production
featured a magnificent cast, including Kendal, Paul Eddington, Claire Bloom,
Rosemary Harris and a young Jennifer Ehle, who, between them, created an
embalmed surface calm hiding an inner turbulence.
After a lengthy hiatus (during which she remained active in the theatre), she
returned to the small screen with the unlikely horticultural whodunit Rosemary
and Thyme (ITV, 2003-). This perilously simple series seemed to get by on the
strength of its experienced and sprightly cast, with Kendal, as plant
pathologist Rosemary Boxer, and Pam Ferris, as fellow plant-lover Laura Thyme,
giving pleasantly skittish performances. This rather farcical series, full of
cartoonish peering around doors and chases down hallways, makes a peculiarly
dispiriting addition to the list of British detective drama.
She was voted the Variety Club Most Promising Newcomer, 1974; Best Actress,
1979; the Clarence Derwent Award, 1980; and Variety Club Woman of the year and
Best Actress, 1984. She received a CBE in 1995.
Tise Vahimagi
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FILM & TV CREDITS
