The actor Brigit Forsyth, who has died aged 83, made her name as Thelma in the BBC television series Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? One critic described Thelma as so prim that she could turn the lifting of a lace curtain into an art form.
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’s creation, which ran from 1973 to 1974, was the sequel to the popular 1960s sitcom The Likely Lads, which starred Rodney Bewes and James Bolam as Bob Ferris and Terry Collier, two single north-east England factory workers who share a flat and the same interests – women, drink and football.
Thelma Chambers was brought in as a girlfriend for the upwardly mobile Bob, now in the white-collar class with a house, car and annual holiday on the Costa Brava, scoffed at by Terry, who clings on to his working-class roots. Thelma and Bob were married halfway through the two series of the show.
“Up until then, I had done a lot of drama on telly,” said Forsyth. “If I wasn’t being murdered, I was murdering somebody or I was a disturbed art teacher. I was playing quite a lot of deranged people, so comedy was a nice change.”
She created laughs again with the sitcom Sharon and Elsie (1984-85), in which she co-starred as the middle-class Elsie Beecroft alongside Janette Beverley as the more down-to-earth Sharon Wilkes, two employees in a greetings card manufacturing company.
But Forsyth’s own favourite television part was Francine Pratt in Playing the Field (1998-2002), the on- and off-pitch women’s football drama created by Kay Mellor. Her character, who hates the game, is married to the Castlefield Blues’ sponsor, played by Ricky Tomlinson, and keeps him happy in return for designer clothes and other luxuries.
“I have never played awful glamour before,” she said. “I had a blond wig, six-inch heels, makeup and my bosom hitched up high.”
Forsyth was born in Malton, North Yorkshire, to Scottish parents, Anne (nee Forsyth), an artist, and Frank Connell, an architect and town planner, and brought up in Edinburgh. She was mesmerised by Stanley Baxter’s performances as a pantomime dame at the city’s King’s theatre and, aged 18, landed her own first lead role, as Sarat Carn, on her way to the gallows, in Charlotte Hastings’s play Bonaventure with the Makars amateur drama group.
But when she left St George’s school, Edinburgh, her parents insisted she learn a skill, so she trained as a secretary. After a couple of jobs, she headed for London and Rada (1958-60), where she won the Emile Littler prize.
She began her professional career back in Edinburgh with the Gateway theatre company (1960-61) before moving on to the Theatre Royal, Lincoln (1961-62) and the Arthur Brough Players in Folkestone (1962). With other actors already named Brigit McConnell and Bridget O’Connell, she changed her professional name to Forsyth on her return to Lincoln in 1962.
At the Edinburgh festival three years later, she played one of the witches in a headline-making production of Macbeth. “That show caused an absolute uproar because they wanted the witches to have the bodies of young girls and the faces of old women, and they wanted us to have our top half naked,” Forsyth recalled. “But the Earl of Harewood, who was running the EIF at the time, said ‘No’. So they put nipple caps on us, which looked absolutely disgusting – and they used to drop off each night. It was absolutely hysterical.”
Later, in the West End, Forsyth played Annie in The Norman Conquests (Globe, now Gielgud, and Apollo theatres, 1974-76) and Dusa in the feminist play Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi (Mayfair theatre, 1976-77). She put her TV breakthrough down to cutting her hair short. “It proved a tremendously lucky omen,” she said.
That break came with Adam Smith (1972), in which she played the younger daughter of the title character, a Scottish minister (Andrew Keir). The director, Brian Mills, then worked with Forsyth on the psychological thriller Holly (1972), when she took the part of a young art teacher kidnapped by a mentally unstable student. Forsyth and Mills married in 1976.
Television roles kept on coming. She was Veronica, one of the product-promotion team, in The Glamour Girls (1980-82), Harriet in the inter-generational sitcom Tom, Dick and Harriet (1982-83), and Helen Yeldham, a hotelier, in the 1989 series of Boon.
There were also appearances in soap opera: as GP Judith Vincent in The Practice (1985-86); Babs Fanshawe, Ken Barlow’s escort agency date who dies of a heart attack, in a 1998 Coronation Street episode; Delphine LaClair, a sales rep for a French company interested in buying Rodney Blackstock’s vineyards, for two short runs in Emmerdale (2005 and 2006); Cressida, mother of the millionaire Nate Tenbury-Newent, in Hollyoaks in 2013; and three roles in Doctors between 2000 and 2012.
Forsyth also played the miserable Madge, who frustrates her sister Mavis’s attempts at a relationship with Granville, in the sitcom sequel Still Open All Hours (2013-19).
A cellist from the age of nine, Forsyth starred as the real-life virtuoso Beatrice Harrison in a 2004 tour of The Cello and the Nightingale. Also on tour, she was a remarkably believable Queen Elizabeth II in A Question of Attribution (2000) and played Marie in Calendar Girls (2008). “I’m Mrs Frosty-Knickers, the one who doesn’t approve of it all.”
In 2017, she played a terminally ill musician in the stage comedy Killing Time, written by her daughter, Zoe Mills, who acted alongside her. At the time, Forsyth revealed that her maternal grandfather, a GP in Yorkshire, had helped dying patients to end their lives. Declaring herself a supporter of euthanasia, she said: “He bumped off probably loads of people with doses of morphine.”
In 1999, Forsyth separated from her husband, but they remained friends until his death in 2006. She is survived by their children, Ben and Zoe.
• Brigit Forsyth (Brigit Dorothea Connell), actor, born 28 July 1940; died 1 December 2023
