Angela Baddeley
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| Angela Baddeley | |
|---|---|
| Born | Madeline Angela Clinton-Baddeley 4 July 1904 London, England |
| Died | 22 February 1976 (aged 71) London, England |
Angela Baddeley, CBE (born Madeline Angela Clinton-Baddeley; 4 July 1904 – 22 February 1976) was an English actress best remembered for her role as Mrs Bridges in the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs. Baddeley also had a long and distinguished career on stage that lasted for 63 years.
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[edit] Early life
Madeline Angela Clinton-Baddeley was born in London in 1904, the daughter of a wealthy family who had servants. She based the character of Mrs Bridges on one of the cooks her family had when she was a child.[1] Her younger sister was the actress Hermione Baddeley. In 1912, at the age of 8, Baddeley made her stage debut at the Dalston Palace in London in a play called The Dawn of Happiness.[1] When she was nine, Angela Baddeley auditioned at the Old Vic Theatre and by the age of 11 she was appearing in Shakespeare plays.[1] During her teenage years, the "consummate little actress", as a national paper called had called her when she was 10, starred in many musicals and pantomimes.[1] She briefly 'retired' from acting at age 18. Her first marriage, to Stephen Thomas, produced one daughter. In c.1930 she married the actor and theatre director Glen Byam Shaw, and they had a son and a daughter. During the early years of her second marriage she and her husband had four servants.[1]
[edit] Later years
Continuing to act on stage, she played the bawd in Tony Richardson's production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1958. She was made a CBE in 1975 for "services to the theatre".[1] She died in London in 1976 of pneumonia at the age of 71, shortly after Upstairs, Downstairs finished being shown on television. Had she lived it is likely that a spin-off series, with Baddeley reprising her role as Mrs. Bridges and Gordon Jackson returning as Mr Hudson, would have been made. This would have been set in the boarding house they had moved to at the end of Upstairs, Downstairs.
She is the grandmother of Charles Hart, the lyricist of The Phantom of the Opera.
