Pamela Charles

Pamela Charles might have inherited the mantle of the great Lizbeth Webb, for she displayed some of the same qualities - a refined innocence, rare charm and a sense of spirit that was willing to break out. Her voice was good too, but to get her only real opportunity to use it she had to go to America.

Pamela Charles (left) cracks open a bottle with Dora Bryan in The Water Gipsies

She was born Pamela Foster on 10 June 1932 in Croydon, Surrey. On leaving the Wallington County School for Girls she studied at the Sylvia Bryant Stage School and then trained at LAMDA. Her professional debut was in a Margate pantomime in 1948 when she appeared as the Spirit of the Beanstalk. Three years later she got into the chorus of Zip Goes A Million at the Palace Theatre, and was given the leading role of Sally Whittle in the post-London tour beginning February 1953. For the 1954 summer season she joined the Fol-de-Rols concert party at Eastbourne.

Her big London break came in August 1955 when she was cast as Jane Bell in A. P. Herbert and Vivian Ellis's pastoral valentine to canal boat life, The Water Gipsies, at the Winter Garden Theatre. Charles (the show's soprano lead) had to hold her own against the comedy performance of Dora Bryan as her sister Lily. Fortunately, Charles had a nice line in insouciant wonder (as can be heard on the original cast recording when she sings the show's most artless number 'When I'm Washing Up').

After The Water Gipsies, Charles did a number of straight plays in repertory theatre - a refuge to which she often turned. She was good in pantomime, but there seemed nothing doing in British musicals, except for a short run as Jane Walker-Thompson in the musical Love A La Carte by Dulcie Gray and Charles Ross. Love A La Carte opened at Richmond in August 1958 and disappeared after a brief tour. In October she played Polly Peachum in The Beggar's Opera at Windsor.

As if to prove how dismally she had been used at home, in February 1959 she took over the role of Eliza Doolittle from Sally Ann Howes in the Broadway production of My Fair Lady. She stayed with the show for two years, leaving in February 1961, but the fact that she had been the leading lady in a smash hit Broadway musical didn't cut much ice in Britain. In 1963 she was entangled in a little revue, Five In Eights, devised and directed by Tony Tanner at the Century Mobile Theatre, Bisney Green, Oxford. The company leaned heavily on the mime artists Julian Chagrin and George Ogilvie, but Five In Eights was speedily set aside. At the New Theatre, Bromley in 1966 she had to be satisfied with the minor role of Helen Walsingham in the British production of the Broadway version of Half a Sixpence.

It was 1966, too, when she was in the celebratory Sixty Thousand Nights at the Bristol Old Vic. There was to be one more West End musical. In March 1968 she was in the original cast of The Canterbury Tales at the Phoenix Theatre. The modest show was a surprise success. It gave audiences the chance to see Charles as the Prioress, Pertelote, Prosperina and the Queen, although the multiple roles didn't give her much to sing.

Still, she stuck at it, interspersing the too infrequent musicals with stints in repertory. She even did time in the West End in The Mousetrap. By 1974 she was working in repertory again (modestly, at Colchester) - a strange fate for a Broadway leading lady. In November 1975 she was seen in the minor role of Mrs Forrester in Cranford, a musical by Joan Littlewood, John Wells and Carl Davis, at Stratford East.