Tony-winning actress and star of Wicked

Born: August 16, 1939;

Died: August 31, 2018

CAROLE Shelley, who has died aged 79, illuminated the West End and Broadway stages in a long career. Her Tony Award-winning career in New York was crowned with her creation of Madame Morrible, ‘press secretary’ to the Wizard of Oz and unabashed supporter of Glinda the Good Fairy, in the original production of Wicked, at the Gershwin Theatre in 2003.

The also recently deceased Neil Simon started Shelley’s career in America, by casting her in The Odd Couple in 1965. As one of the constantly giggling Pigeon sisters, “two English girls from upstairs”, she repeated her role in the 1968 film version, flummoxing Jack Lemmon’s neurotic Felix before joining him in bursting into tears, and played it again in four early episodes of the subsequent TV series.

A telling credit was when she replaced Maggie Smith in the title role of Mary, Mary, in late 1963 at the Globe. Throughout her career, critics compared the red-haired, long-necked Shelley with Dame Maggie, and she also shared an aptitude for eccentric comedy, kindled in the dying days of West End revues, culminating in acidic character studies in classic revivals.

She was born in London, to Curtis Shelley, a songwriter and Deborah, a soprano. Carole herself asserted she made her first stage appearance at the age of three, and had intended to be a dancer, until breaking her foot. In 1951, she played the young Estella in an abridged version of Great Expectations, by the Dickensian Tabard players, in the courtyard of the George Inn, Southwark.

After a radio sitcom, Home and Away (Home Service, 1954), as Jack Buchanan’s daughter, she opened at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh in 1958, in a tour of West End revue For Amusement Only. Genuine West End revues followed, New Cranks (Lyric, Hammersmith) and The Art Of Living (Criterion, both 1960), before she played one of the three air-hostesses in an 18-month run of Boeing-Boeing (Apollo, 1962).

The first Broadway staging of Joe Orton’s Loot (Biltmore, 1968), with Shelley as naughty nurse Fay, did not last long. America had caught up to Orton by the time the actress played the ravenous Mrs Prentice in What The Butler Saw in New York in 1989.

Nominated for a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress, in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular among an otherwise American cast, she won as Best Actress for The Elephant Man in 1981. . As the Victorian actress Madge Kendal, who displayed compassion towards John Merrick, Shelley maintained her shaking Merrick’s hand on first meeting was her own idea; during its last year, David Bowie took over the title role.

In 1989, Shelley returned to Britain for another role originated by Maggie Smith, the first half of Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage at the Globe. At the Circle in the Square Theatre, she remained flamboyant as the calculating Frosine in Moliere’s The Miser (1991). Her other Tony nominations were for Stepping Out in 1987 and as Grandma in Billy Elliott from 2008-2011.

She was glimpsed as one of Hattie Jacques’ taxi fleet in Carry On Cabby (1963). For Disney and alongside fellow Pigeon sister Monica Evans, she provided voices for The Aristocats (1970) and Robin Hood (1973). Her American husband, Albert Woods, died in 1971; several cousins survive her.

GAVIN GAUGHAN