IN 2006 Stephen Fry wrote about Me and My Girl, the perennially popular musical he had updated and adapted in the 1980s.
One lifelong fan of the musical wrote in to say he was sorry that Fry had not mentioned the leading lady in the original 1930s production, one Teddie St Denis. “She was a great Sally and really deserves a mention,” the reader added.
In October 1937 Teddie starred in Me and My Girl at Glasgow’s Alhambra alongside Lupino Lane. “It got a cool response in Glasgow and London despite its star cast,” writes Graeme Smith in his book on the Alhambra, but it “came back the next year to acclaim”. The show’s many songs included, of course, The Lambeth Walk. Brief BBC footage of the show can be seen today on YouTube.
In the photograph, incidentally, in a reversal of the usual situation, St Denis is getting the autograph of Thomas Cunningham, driver of the Coronation Scot, one of the best-known trains of the 1930s.
The IMDb film website says St Denis was born in Glasgow, in 1908, as Catherine Denham, and died in London in 1990. She wrote a well-received 1940 autobiography, Almost A Star, in which, according to one review, she came across “as a gay and charming person with a cheerful courage that must have helped her considerably on her way from provincial music halls to ‘almost’ stardom in the London production of Me and My Girl”.
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