- Stella Moray
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- Support, stand-in, take-over … and star
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 An immensely
likeable musical actress with a fine sense of comedy and an immediate
rapport with her audiences, Stella Moray has been entertaining
for over half a century. Still at it, she has always been willing
to support, stand-in, and take-over, and she didn't disappoint
audiences when they found her promoted to a star. Even those
turning up to see Elaine Stritch in Sail Away must have been
pleasantly surprised when her standby took charge at various
performances. They can't have gone away disappointed.
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- Although she had always loved the theatre, Stella didn't
get to perform until she joined the ATS during the War as a young
woman (we don't know her birth dates). Here she was a featured
singer with an Ordnance Corps Dance Band, and was subsequently
cast in Stars in Battledress, with which company she toured the
Middle and the Far East. The war over, her first real break came
in pantomime at the London Casino, Humpty Dumpty, starring Vic
Oliver and Julie Andrews. Her first musical was Belinda Fair
at the Saville Theatre in March 1949, in which she played the
supporting role of Annie Ogle-Eyes. The following year she was
cast as Augusta (Charlotte Greenwood's old part) in a revival
of Robert Stolz's operetta Wild Violets at the Stoll Theatre.
The production lasted 122 performances. Ian Carmichael, another
star of that show, describes Moray as 'an attractive, slim, dark-haired
young lass'. After Wild Violets, she went into Brigadoon at His
Majesty's Theatre as a take-over.
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- It was a decade later before Moray's musical theatre career
resumed, when she took over the role of Cleo (singing 'Ooh, My
Feet') from the iron-lunged Libi Staiger in Frank Loesser's The
Most Happy Fella at the Coliseum. In 1962 she was cast as Maimie
Candijack in Noel Coward's breezy Sail Away at the Savoy Theatre.
Although she had no song of her own, she was also hired as standby
for Elaine Stritch in the role of Mimi Paragon. On those occasions
when Miss Stritch didn't make it across the road from the Savoy
Hotel, Moray was more than satisfactory in keeping the curtain
up.
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- The musical House of Cards emanated from the Players Theatre,
in whose Late Joys programmes of Victorian music hall Moray had
established herself as a favourite. She stayed with House of
Cards, playing Mme Kleopatra Mamayev both at the Players and
in the short-lived transfer to the Phoenix Theatre in 1963. The
next year Wendy Toye cast her as the maid, Wilson, in Robert
and Elizabeth, one of the most successful British 'period' musicals
ever. Moray was well parted, and got to sing one of the show's
most sentimental pieces, 'The Girls That Boys Dream About' with
the Moulton-Barrett offspring.
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- Her comedic flair found more expression in the British edition
of the Jule Styne-scored Funny Girl at the Prince of Wales Theatre
in 1966. Fifth-billed as the slack-jawed Mrs Strakosh, Moray
had a hand in a couple of funny numbers - 'If A Girl Isn't Pretty'
and 'Find Yourself A Man' - with Kay Medford and Jay Allen. But
Funny Girl fell foul to the behaviour of its star, and what should
have been a long-runner was off in three months. After it closed,
Moray's career greyed over. At Bristol she was The Bolter in
Val May's production of Julian Slade's The Pursuit of Love in
1967. Its reception showed how disinterested British managements
were in British musicals (at least ones by Julian Slade). Quick,
Quick, Slow - a show about the strange race of people who go
ballroom dancing - got much the same treatment at Birmingham
Repertory Theatre in 1969. It had sharpness and point, and some
good writers (playwright David Turner, lyricist Julian More and
composer Monty Norman) and Moray as Vicky, but it died at Birmingham.
- It was eight years after Funny Girl before Moray was back
in London, this time playing the keeper of the brothel, Madame
Blanche, in Julian More's musical Bordello. By default it was
a show about Toulouse Lautrec (there would be another one in
London in 2000), played by Henry Woolf on a stage inhabited otherwise
only by women, most of whom seem to have been a job-lot from
the Players Theatre. Their combined charms couldn't get Bordello
beyond 41 performances at the Queen's Theatre in April 1974.
- Moray had already had a long career, but at the beginning
of the 1980s she excelled herself as a great take-over Miss Hannigan
in Annie at the Victoria Palace. In the new century, she still
crops up with refreshing regularity on TV commercials, where
millions now fail to recognise her as one of the great unsung
heroines of British musical theatre.
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- Selected discography:
Robert and Elizabeth. Original cast recording
Sail Away. Original cast recording
Late Joys (Victorian Music Hall)
Show Boat [as Ellie] for World Records
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