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Fenella Fielding
 
Answering the British need for a high camp actress, the eye-batting Fielding obliged and found popularity in the 1950s and 1960s
 
Camp was a word that somehow attached itself from the beginning to Fenella Fielding. She did little to contradict the reputation. With wide-opened fluttering eyes and a voice that melted lard, she was unmistakable. She managed to be sexually enticing without seeming in the least sexual, a skill that was obviously very much to the taste of the late fifties and sixties, after which she found it more difficult to find a place in the scheme of things. When the mist cleared, there didn't seem to much personality there, and she never became known as a real person outside her dating image.
 
She was born November 17 1934, educated at North London Collegiate School, and subsequently began work as a secretary. Her entry in Who's Who in the Theatre gives her stage debut as 1954, but in 1953 she appeared in a little fringe revue, In The Lap of the Gods, at the New Lindsey Theatre. The following year she was understudying in another, more lavish, revue, Cockles and Champagne, at the Saville Theatre. Revues were the order of the day. Also in 1954, she was in Sandy Wilson's revue See You Later at the Palladium (Edinburgh), and in December she was cast for a Flanders and Swann revue, Pay the Piper, at the Saville Theatre (not listed in her Who's Who entry). At only 20 performances, it was a rare occurrence for Flanders and Swann - a quick flop - its cast sounding like a dog's breakfast (Elsie and Doris Waters and Elisabeth Welch seemed unlikely bedfellows). Two years later Fielding played in the revue Light and Shade, restaged the same year as Reprise.
 
But her first real assault on the West End, in 1956, was Jubilee Girl at the Victoria Palace. Fielding played Luba Tradjejka in a show that hovered somewhere between musical comedy and revue; it covered all contingencies by calling itself 'a musical production'. The score is now totally forgotten (among its songs were 'Men Only Get in the Way', 'Careful Heart' and 'Always Dreaming'); Plays and Players thought that 'the tunes remain pale ghosts of every miniscule musical' and had its reservations about Miss Fielding's contribution who 'is clearly the darling of the smartie-party revue. Raucous and hopeful she was helpful, by and large, but I could not, with my hand on my heart, call her characterisation polished'. Jubilee Girl, limping in to London after a disastrous tour littered with cast member casualties, hung on for just a few weeks.
 
It was probably Sandy Wilson who rescued Fielding from spending the rest of her life as a secretary, when in 1958 he insisted that she play Lady Parvula de Panzoust in his adaptation of Firbank's esoteric novel Valmouth, first at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith and then at the Saville Theatre. The part was ideal for Fielding's particular talents, and she had a (for its day) risqué number, 'Only a Passing Phase' that gave her ample scope for sexual innuendo, but Valmouth, although quickly taken up as a cult show, did not find much favour with the tasteless British public.
 
Valmouth brought much appreciation, and firmly established her as a strong comedy player, but revues - still clinging to popularity before they were swept away for ever - brought out her best qualities. Her greatest success was in Pieces of Eight, one of the most intelligent of its type, seen at the ApolloTheatre in 1959, with a panoply of material contributed by such stars as Harold Pinter and (principally) Peter Cook. Fielding starred opposite Kenneth Williams, and managed to wrest some of the limelight from him, notably in 'The Laughing Grains' (a Cook routine about a broken-down vaudeville act), 'If Only' (a brilliant Cook sketch about a moaning elderly couple) and 'Outdoor Girl', Sandy Wilson's song for a prostitute now obliged by law to keep off the streets. Pieces of Eight was a genuine hit, but even by the time it closed, the genre was in its death throes. There was another revue, much less ambitious, called Diversions For Five, seen in 1962 before reappearing under a new title, Twists, but it didn't play the West End proper.
 
Another attempt to establish Fielding as a star in her own right came with So Much To Remember, originally staged at the Establishment. It got to the West End in September 1963, directed at the Vaudeville Theatre by veteran William Chappell. Fielding played actress Maudie Marlowe, recounting her colourful and exaggerated past, in which - among things - she wondered if she might not have been the cause of World War I. Fielding co-wrote the libretto with Johnny Whyte, and the music was by Stanley Myers. Though generally admired for her stoicism in carrying the evening almost single-handed (there was no other woman in the cast) So Much To Remember proved that there might have been quite a lot to forget, and closed up shop before it had a chance to settle in. Its closure seemed to confirm what Jubilee Girl had suggested, that Fielding was not an ideal star for a show.
 
There was more disappointment in 1964. She was cast as Elvira in the British production of High Spirits, the musical of Noel Coward's play Blithe Spirit, but Coward disliked Fielding in rehearsals and had her sacked. He brought in the American singer Marti Stevens to do the part in which Fielding would surely have excelled.
Beyond musicals and revues, Fielding proved herself as a resourceful actress and comedienne, as adept at Carry On roles (creating a classic double act with Williams in Carry On Screaming) as at playing Ibsen. In 1982 there was one more musical, but she had done it already. The revival of Valmouth seen at Chichester in 1982 had the advantage of Bertice Reading in the main role, and Fielding was still up to her old part of Lady Parvula, but the production suffered from some unattractive casting and dismal musical arrangements, and it made Valmouth seem a little passé, with some of its old charm rubbed off by unsympathetic handling. Once again Wilson's masterpiece was denied success, and Fielding's career in musical theatre more or less slipped out of sight.

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