[These daily posts will cover little known actors or people that have appeared in more recent films and TV series. Various degrees of information that I was able to find will be given and anything that you can add would be appreciated.
Anthea Shirley Askey was born on March 2, 1933, in Golders Green, London, England As an actress she stood in the shadow of her famous comedian father Arthur Askey [1900-1982], though for some years she was a well-known stage and television singer and actress. Anthea was the apple of Arthur's eye and he helped establish her as a singer and light comedy actress.
With a pre-1960s wholesome look, Anthea herself had intelligence, pert charm and a sharp wit, but not perhaps her father's single-mindedness. As a young girl, she had wanted to be a vet, but while at school on the Isle of Wight she was invited by the Ventnor repertory company to join the cast of the Emlyn Williams's play “Dear Evelyn”. She was then 13. It was then, she said, that she was 'bitten by the show business bug'.
She followed her father's pattern of hard apprenticeship in concert parties and pantomimes, but it was BBC Radio which helped bring her to national prominence when she appeared in an adaptation of Richmal Compton's “Just William” as Violet Elizabeth Bott, the schoolgirl with the cut-glass voice and crush on the unresponsive William.
Her first television appearance had family connections. when she appeared with her father in ‘Before Your Very Eyes’. In the early 1960s, she appeared in the ‘Dickie Henderson Half Hour’ on television, based on a hugely successful American show written by Neil Simon. Askey played Henderson's wife but left the program to care for her family.
She returned to work in the 1980s and, although she had largely fallen from the public eye over the last decades, she continued to work in pantomime and on radio shows. In 1982 she had good reviews for her role of the Good Witch of the North in the play “The Wizard Of Oz”, and in 1984 she was, as the Financial Times observed a 'splendidly articulate cat' in the Richmond Theatre's “Dick Whittington”.
With Will Fyffe Junior. she appeared often in a show which drew on memories of both their fathers, and she died at a time when she was due to appear again with him. (They had planned to marry next month.) She usually managed to treat her cancer with good-humored fortitude. She was told recently that a new cancer 'cure' had worked on mice. 'Well,' she observed, 'I'm no bigger than a mouse.' Anthea died in Worthing West Sussex, England on February 28, 1999. She left Will Fyffe Junior; and two sons and a daughter from her first marriage to Bill Stewart
Althea appeared in only one Euro-western as Susie Ramsbottom in 1956’s “Ramsbottom Rides Again” starring her father.
ASKEY, Anthea (Anthea Shirley Askey)
[3/2/1933, Golders Green, London, England, U.K. – 2/28/1999, Worthing, West
Sussex, England, U.K. (cancer)] – theater, film, radio, TV actress, daughter of
writer, film, TV actor, singer Arthur Askey [1900-1982], married to Bill
Stewart [1927- ] (1956-1999) mother of
Jane Stewart, Andrew Stewart, William Stewart.
Ramsbottom Rides Again – 1956 (Susie Ramsbottom)
Anthea Askey's father was none other than Arthur Askey of "Ramsbottom fame". She played his daughter, Susie, in "Bill Ramsbottom Rides Again".
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