Hazel Douglas

Hazel Douglas (born Hazel Smith, 2 November 1923 – 8 September 2016) was an English actress whose career spanned stage, film, television, and radio across more than six decades. Born in London, she served in the Royal Navy, where she met Peter Sawford; the two married in 1949 and remained together until his death in 1991.

Douglas established an early foothold in the theatre when she joined Brian Rix's company in 1954, beginning with John Chapman's Whitehall farce Dry Rot, which accumulated more than 1,400 performances. She remained with Rix's company for eleven years, working through the celebrated run of Whitehall farces. Those productions were also adapted for television, and Douglas appeared in episodes of the comedy series Dial RIX between 1962 and 1963, alongside Rix and his wife Elspet Gray. Rix was known to remark that Douglas possessed the finest double-take in the business.

Her stage work extended to Broadway, where she appeared in 1965 in All in Good Time. Television work from the early years of the medium included Sunday Night Theatre and The Liver Birds, and her small-screen credits grew considerably over the following decades to encompass The Bill, Casualty, Gimme Gimme Gimme, At Home with the Braithwaites, Where the Heart Is, The Royal, Asylum, Eyes Down, The IT Crowd, Gavin & Stacey, and Vicious, among others.

On film, Douglas accumulated a range of character roles beginning with The Night We Got the Bird in 1961. Subsequent film appearances included Closing Numbers (1993), The Young Poisoner's Handbook (1995), Face (1997), The Parole Officer (2001), Asylum (2005), Run Fatboy Run (2007), Albatross (2011), and The Great Martian War 1913–1917 (2013). Her most widely seen film role came in 2010, when she portrayed Bathilda Bagshot in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1.

In the later years of her career Douglas remained consistently active. In 2009 she played Mrs Harries, the mother of Josephine Tewson, in the Wireless Theatre Company radio drama Leaves in Autumn by Susan Casanove. The following year she appeared as Peggy Lowe in the BBC4 comedy Getting On, and in 2011 she took the role of Maureen Bright in the BBC soap opera Doctors. In 2013 she appeared in the sitcom Vicious, starring Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi, as Mildred, the mother of Jacobi's character Stuart, and in 2014 she portrayed Edna Locke in an episode of the detective drama Suspects. Douglas died on 8 September 2016 at the age of 92.