Virginia Vernon

A brief stardom

She came among us and was gone. Virginia Vernon, sporting a statuesque soprano beyond her apparent youth, was a pleasing presence in a few British musicals for a decade or so.

She was born (probably) in 1936. At the age of thirteen she was Will o' the Wisp in the annual Christmas production of Where The Rainbow Ends at the Stoll Theatre, and the following year (1950) she was given the leading role of Rosamund. At the age of sixteen she played Cinderella to the Buttons of Max Bygraves, and went on to appear with the Fol-de-Rols concert party and in variety at Blackpool. Her programme notes state that she 'opened in the Jimmy Edwards' show London Laughs' - at the Adelphi in 1952 - although I can trace no separate billing of her appearance in that show. But in December 1955 she played the supporting role of Amy in the British musical A Girl Called Jo at the Piccadilly Theatre. She acquitted herself well, even if she didn't get much to do beyond a sweet duet with Denis Quilley 'Why Do I Feel Like This?' but A Girl Called Jo (lumbered with considerable book problems) didn't last too long.

In April 1956 she was in a West End play, Commemoration Ball, and was then asked to take over from Eleanor Drew as the leading lady of the long-running Salad Days at the Vaudeville Theatre. She stayed with the production until the show closed in February 1960. That same year she worked in British film studios, making movies such as the now probably unwatchable 'Watch Your Stern'. It was in 1960, too, that she played Polly Smith in the film The Millionairess with Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, but it never seemed likely that Vernon would make it as a film star.

In May 1961 she made what seems to have been her final appearance in the West End as Ethel le Neve, the lover of Dr Crippen, in the Wolf Mankowitz-Monty Norman musical-hall musical Belle, at the Strand Theatre. This represents her only recorded performance (still commercially available, if only on cassette), and we can hear what a deeply attractive musical actress she must have been. Her singing of Ethel's first love song, among the instruments of Dr Crippen's dental surgery - 'You Are Mine' - has a transparent beauty, intimate and completely truthful. What Vernon does successfully is to give so rounded a portrayal of an essentially tragic heroine. There are other delights, too, notably the aria 'I Can't Stop Singing', a number that may or may not have been heard in London (it is listed in the programme, but may have been dropped. If it was, it shouldn't have been.) Anyway, Vernon was a prize warbler.

And after Belle? Silence. Virginia Vernon married the comedian Ben Warriss and retired from the stage.

Discography

Belle Original London cast

 

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