Levenshulme Life

If ever an actor breathed the spirit of the prewar variety halls, it was the raven-haired, ebullient Pat Kirkwood, who has died aged 86. She went on to become the leading lady in musicals by Noel Coward and Leonard Bernstein, and her achievement was recognised by appearances in four royal variety performances. However, she never received a formal honour. Some observers put this down to a friendship at one point with the Duke of Edinburgh, though she vehemently denied rumours of an affair. A trouper whose voice, one critic said, could "gild any song", with legs that another, Kenneth Tynan, described as "the eighth wonder of the world", Kirkwood came from the heyday of northern variety and pantomime. In her first professional appearance, at the Royal Hippodrome, Salford, Greater Manchester, in April 1936, she was billed as the schoolgirl songstress. Born in Pendleton, Lancashire, the daughter of a Scottish shipping clerk father, she had indeed been studying at Levenshulme High School for girls, where her closest friend was another future actor, Beryl Reid. By December 1936, Kirkwood had appeared in Jack and the Beanstalk at the New Theatre, Cardiff, and thereafter enjoyed a long career in almost every branch of showbusiness, from musical comedy and cabaret to more serious stage work, films, radio and television. Having worked beside such stalwarts as Billy Russell, Stanley Lupino, Bobby Howes, Fred Emney, Vic Oliver and Jerry Desmonde, Kirkwood never failed to get on terms with her audience. Scarcely a Christmas passed without one of her long-legged, thigh-slapping principal boys strutting the regional or West End stage. She took her final pantomime bow in Aladdin at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1973. It was, however, as a star of West End musical comedy that she will be most vividly remembered. Whether starring or sharing the lead with her third husband Hubert Gregg, Kirkwood could be counted on for energy, style and gusto. When in middle age she began to "go straight" by touring in plays by Arthur Wing Pinero, Somerset Maugham, Coward and Ray Cooney, the old zest was unmistakably that of a trouper for whom kicking up her heels was instinctive. At 16 she went into the West End as Dandini in Cinderella (1937), and films soon followed - Save a Little Sunshine (1938), Me and My Pal (1939), Come On, George (also 1939, with George Formby) and Band Waggon (1940) with radio comedians Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch, in which Kirkwood sang Boomps-a-Daisy, No Leave, No Love, Stars in Your Eyes and Once a Sinner. George Black's musical show Black Velvet (1939), in which she sang Cole Porter's My Heart Belongs to Daddy and Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love, made her a major star, and wartime productions such as Top of the World (1940), Lady Behave (1941) and Let's Face It (1942) showed her facility in song and dance and as an excellent "feed" for stand-up comics. West End pantomimes continued with Humpty Dumpty (1943) and Goody Two Shoes (1944), but in 1945 her film Flight from Folly brought her a Hollywood contract with MGM. However, the Van Johnson musical No Leave, No Love (1946) was a flop. She hated the system of being kept "on option" by MGM, attempted suicide, and after eight months in a New York sanatorium returned to London in 1947 for a starring role in the revue Starlight Roof. Her first chance in musical comedy came with Ace of Clubs (1950), written for her by Coward and set in the Soho underworld. It gave Kirkwood, as London cabaret star Pinkie Leroy, fine chances to show how she could handle a song. It was her way with numbers such as My Kind of Man, Josephine and Chase Me, Charlie which "got them roaring", as Coward put it in his diary. Further London credits ranged from the revue Fancy Free with Tommy Trinder (1951) to Peter Pan (1953), in which she also toured, but she gained a wider audience through her television depiction of the music-hall singer Marie Lloyd. This two-hour biography, Our Marie (1953), was virtually a one-woman show. It was a personal triumph, and the following year she became the first female star to have her own one-hour television series, the Pat Kirkwood Show. A sold-out cabaret season at the Desert Inn, Las Vegas, led to a return to the West End in 1955 in Leonard Bernstein's musical Wonderful Town. As the lively, optimistic Ruth, who sets out with her sister from Ohio to conquer New York, Kirkwood won wide acclaim from press and public. Three years later, following her marriage to Gregg, a new husband-and-wife song-and-dance team arrived in the West End. Set in 1913, the English musical comedy Chrysanthemum successfully mingled burlesque and melodrama in an exotic and satirically romantic tale of white slavers. The couple rose to fame on radio and television in such programmes as My Patricia (1956) and From Me to You (1957). Their 1956 television programme celebrating music-hall male impersonator Vesta Tilley led the following year to a film, After the Ball. Back in the West End in 1961, they reappeared together unexpectedly in a straight farce as the Rev and Mrs Lionel Toop in Philip King's Pools Paradise, a belated sequel to the same author's wartime hit, See How They Run, in which the stage was again crowded with indignant clerics. Kirkwood took her continuing delight in musical comedy to the provinces - her lascivious Mrs Squeezum at Cheltenham in Bernard Miles's musical romp Lock Up Your Daughters (1966), or at the Edinburgh festival (1976) as the wealthy American nightclub backer Vera Simpson in Pal Joey. Occasional stage appearances followed in the 1980s, and in 1992 she was back at the London Palladium singing There's No Business Like Show Business in A Glamorous Night with Evelyn Laye and Friends. In 1994, Noel/Cole - Let's Do It ran at the Chichester Festival Theatre for 10 weeks, and Kirkwood appeared on the television show This Is Your Life. The publication of Sarah Bradford's Elizabeth: A Biography of Britain's Queen (1996) reminded the world that in 1948 the society photographer Baron, Kirkwood's then boyfriend, had introduced her to Prince Philip after a performance, following which she was seen dancing at a nightclub with the royal consort. She dismissed the resulting speculation in the chapter HRH and All That in her 1999 memoirs, The Time of My Life. Of one supposed royal gift, she wrote: "I do possess a white Rolls-Royce. It stands on the mantelpiece of my home and was given to me by my second husband, Sparky, at the time these rumours began." She had four marriages: in 1940 to showbusiness executive Jack Lister, ending in divorce; in 1952 to Sparky, Russian-Greek shipowner Spiro de Spero Gabriele, who died two years later; in 1955 to Gregg, ending in divorce; and in 1981 to solicitor Peter Knight, who survives her. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/obituary/0,,2233091,00.html Saturday December 29, 2007 The Guardian