Joy Nichols

Joy Eileen Nichols (17 February 1925 – 23 June 1992) was an Australian-British comedian, actress, and singer who built a career across Australia, Britain, and the United States. Born in Sydney, she began performing at an early age, making her first radio broadcast at seven in a production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Her early career included a song-and-dance double act with her brother George, appearances on the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and commercial radio work that encompassed both drama and comedy. She compered Lever Colgate's The Youth Show and hosted her own series, Joy Nichols Presents. In 1946, she appeared in the Australian adventure film Smithy before relocating to Britain to pursue broader opportunities.

In Britain, Nichols quickly established herself in radio. Producer Charles Maxwell cast her in a major role in the final series of Navy Mixture, broadcast on the BBC General Forces Programme in 1947, where she worked alongside Jimmy Edwards. That collaboration led directly to her involvement in Take It From Here, which ran from 1948 to 1960 and starred Edwards, fellow Australian Dick Bentley, and Nichols, who contributed both singing and comedy to the programme. The show became one of the BBC's most prominent radio productions, and Nichols was among its central figures until she departed her role permanently in 1953, after which June Whitfield and Alma Cogan took over her comedy and singing duties respectively. In 1953, she also recorded the novelty song "Little Red Monkey," written by Stephen Gale and Jack Jordan, with Edwards and Bentley, a recording that received frequent airplay on the BBC's Children's Favourites into the early 1960s.

During her years in Britain, Nichols participated in two Royal Command Variety Performances, in November 1949 and again in 1952. She topped bills at Moss Empire theatres in 1952 and took part in Take It From Us, a stage production performed in London and Blackpool in 1950 and 1951. In 1949, she married Wally Peterson, an American musical comedy performer then touring in the London production of Oklahoma!, and the couple had a daughter, Roberta, born in 1952. In 1953, she also appeared in the BBC Television programme Dominion's Salute, representing Australia as part of the network's Coronation tribute. That same year she returned to Australia before eventually relocating with her husband to the United States.

Nichols appeared in the West End production of The Pajama Game in 1955, performing at the Coliseum theatre alongside Edmund Hockridge, Max Wall, and Arthur Lowe. In 1957, she took a role in Charlie Chaplin's film A King in New York as a nightclub vocalist, performing Chaplin's own composition "Now That It's Ended."

Her Broadway career spanned from 1959 to 1968. She appeared in Fiorello!, which opened in New York in November 1959, followed by supporting roles in the musicals Redhead and Darling of the Day and the revue The Girls Against the Boys. Despite sustained work on Broadway across that decade, she was unable to secure leading roles. After an unsuccessful attempt to resume her career in England, Nichols left show business and worked as a retail assistant in her later years.

Nichols and Peterson divorced in the mid-1970s, though the two maintained an amicable relationship in the years that followed. She died in New York on 23 June 1992 at the age of 67.