Joyce Grenfell was an English diseuse, singer, actress and writer. She was known for the songs and monologues she wrote and performed, at first in revues and later in her solo shows. She never appeared as a stage actress, but had roles, mostly comic, in many films, including Miss Gossage in The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) and Police Sergeant Ruby Gates in the St. Trinian’s series (from 1954). She was a well-known broadcaster on radio and television. As a writer, she was the first radio critic for The Observer, contributed to Punch and published a volume of memoirs.
Born to an affluent Anglo-American family, Grenfell had abandoned early hopes of becoming an actress when she was invited to perform a comic monologue in a West End revue in 1939. Its success led to a career as an entertainer, giving her creations in theatres in five continents between 1940 and 1969.
Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure (1954) was her first more or less solo West End show (there were three dancers providing interludes between Grenfell’s numbers). The Stage commented that any doubts that Grenfell could sustain a solo evening were quickly dispelled: Miss Grenfell satirises, gently but inevitably, 20 different women, including the earnest but misguided devotee of health through rhythm, the arty curiosity-shop owner, the offhand sales-girl, the mercenary writer of children’s stories (a gem, this!), the Victorian hostess whose husband had left her, the humourless American discoverer of folk songs of many lands, the shrinking but eager girl at the local palais, the incompetent but ardent Scottish dancer, the modern miss, and the Swedish visitor at a cocktail party.
During the 1950s and 1960s Grenfell appeared in a number of films in roles including Miss Gossage, Police Sergeant Ruby Gates, Mrs Barham in The Americanization of Emily and Hortense Astor in The Yellow Rolls Royce. Away from the theatre, Grenfell served as a member of the influential Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting from 1960 to 1962, and was president of the Society of Women Broadcasters and Writers.
The rest of Grenfell’s stage career was in a series of solo shows in London and on tour. Between 1957 and 1970 she gave her show Joyce Grenfell in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States, as well as around Britain and in the West End. Her last live performance was at Windsor Castle for the Queen’s Waterloo Dinner in 1973.
