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Sheila Bernette
 
For pert eccentricity, there was nothing to touch her, but British musicals didn't know what to make of her
 
Miss Bernette's own programme notes have it: 'a petite and talented brunette exuding vitality'. Anyone who has seen her performing will testify to her fine sense of comedy, an art that helped make her a true star at the Players Theatre, where she has made countless appearances in Victorian music-hall vignettes and in pantomime. She managed to make a reputation in the dying days of variety (her working association with Leslie Crowther produced many comic gems), and became a familiar face on British (and American) television via her 'old lady' impersonation in Candid Camera, but musicals didn't hold such rosy prospects.
 
The first professional musical for which there is a trace is Life With The Lyons, a show set up for the summer season at the Hippodrome, Blackpool, in 1952. Bernette played Nora in a company that included all the Lyons' family - Ben, Bebe and the limited talents of their children Barbara and Richard - as well as Diana Dors. In 1953 Bernette was in the company of a Vivian Ellis revue, Over The Moon, at the Piccadilly Theatre, and the following year she played Josephine, one of a gaggle of young girls, in the disastrous Happy Holiday at the Palace Theatre. She then took over the important role of Dulcie in The Boy Friend from Maria Charles at the Wyndhams Theatre. Much of her career was taken up with the Players Theatre, where she was hailed as a favourite performer, and she became a popular artist in television comedy, notably in The Black and White Minstrel Show, and in an on-stage partnership with Leslie Crowther.
 
In 1963 she played two supporting roles in a revival of No Bed For Bacon, a musical that never seemed likely to be loved by the masses. It played at the Ashcroft, Croydon for two weeks and then toured for a week. Her best musical role came in 1977 when she was cast as Miss Tweed in the British production of the Agatha Christie spoof Something's Afoot, seen at the Ambassador's Theatre. Tessie O'Shea had done it on Broadway, where the production had flopped. It hung on a few months in its tiny London home before being packed away, but Something's Afoot was a thoroughly amusing and agreeable entertainment. As the tweedy amateur sleuth who solved its many murders, Bernette almost certainly had the role of her career.
 
There was one more musical: the only musicalisation of The Importance Of Being Earnest ever to reach London. The Importance, as it was imaginatively titled, opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1984, was confounded by the critics and lost its place after only 29 performances. As the dithering and confused Miss Prism, Bernette again had a role that exercised her particular qualities. They won't make them like her any more.

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