Angela Baddeley

Madeleine Angela Clinton-Baddeley, known professionally as Angela Baddeley, was an English stage and television actress born on 4 July 1904 in West Ham, Essex, and died on 22 February 1976. She is perhaps best remembered for portraying Mrs. Kate Bridges, the cook at 165 Eaton Place, in the television period drama Upstairs, Downstairs, which ran from 1971 to 1975. Her stage career extended across seven decades.

Baddeley came from a wealthy family, and she later drew on memories of the family's domestic staff when developing the character of Mrs. Bridges. Her younger sister was actress Hermione Baddeley. In 1912, both sisters enrolled at Margaret Morris's dancing school in Chelsea, which Angela credited as a foundational influence on her stage work. That same year, at the age of eight, she made her stage debut at the Dalston Palace of Varieties in a production called The Dawn of Happiness. At nine she auditioned at the Old Vic Theatre, and in November 1915 she made her Old Vic debut in Richard III, going on to appear in numerous other Shakespeare productions there. During her teenage years she performed in musicals and pantomimes, and a national newspaper had referred to her as a consummate little actress when she was ten years old.

Following a period touring Australia in Barrie comedies, Baddeley built a reputation as a prominent stage actress. In the early 1930s she appeared in two films: The Speckled Band (1931), a Sherlock Holmes adaptation featuring Raymond Massey, and The Ghost Train (1931), based on the stage thriller of the same name. Throughout the 1940s she took on a range of strong female stage roles, among them Miss Prue in Love for Love and Catherine Winslow in The Winslow Boy. In 1958 she played the bawd in Tony Richardson's production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. In 1960 she appeared as Mistress Quickly in the BBC Shakespeare history series An Age of Kings, performing alongside her sister Hermione, who played Doll Tearsheet.

Baddeley's Broadway career brought her to New York in 1936, when she appeared in Night Must Fall, originally from her home city of London. Following the conclusion of Upstairs, Downstairs, she replaced Hermione Gingold in the original London production of A Little Night Music. In 1975 she was awarded a CBE for services to the theatre.

In her personal life, Baddeley briefly stepped away from acting at the age of eighteen. Her first marriage, to Stephen Thomas, produced one daughter. On 8 July 1929 she married actor and stage director Glen Byam Shaw, with whom she had a son and a daughter. She was the grandmother of Charles Hart, the lyricist of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, and a half-sister of the clergyman Bill Baddeley. Baddeley died on 22 February 1976 at Grayshott Hall from H1N1 influenza at the age of 71, shortly after Upstairs, Downstairs concluded its run. A planned spin-off series centered on Mrs. Bridges and butler Mr. Angus Hudson did not proceed following her death.