Actress made her name as one of the kooky Pigeon sisters in The Odd Couple
‘‘I play light comedy with the same intensity I’d give to Lady Macbeth. The energy is the same, the truth is the same.’’
Carole Shelley Actress b August 16, 1939 d August 31, 2018
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau made for a scintillating double act in the film of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, but perhaps the film’s most memorable scene involved the English actresses Carole Shelley, who has died aged 79, and Monica Evans as their would-be love interest.
Shelley and Evans played the kooky sisters Gwendolyn and Cecily Pigeon, who go on a double date with Lemmon’s neurotic Felix and Matthau’s slobbish and flirtatious Oscar.
The evening turns into a fiasco when Felix starts weeping about his estranged wife. Gwendolyn and Cecily sob uncontrollably in sympathy and, to Oscar’s fury, the date is ruined.
The two actresses had already played the same parts in the 1965 Broadway production, personally cast by Simon, who took the sisters’ names from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and travelled to London to recruit them, having found nobody in New York to play the parts.
Critics hailed their sister act as a triumph, characterised by the exquisite innocence of Shelley’s response to Felix telling them that he wrote news bulletins for CBS. ‘‘Where do you get your ideas from?’’ she asked.
‘‘I play light comedy with the same intensity I’d give to Lady Macbeth,’’ she told the New York Times. ‘‘The energy is the same, the truth is the same.’’
Lemmon did not appear in the Broadway version, but Matthau did and struck up a close friendship with Shelley. After she complained that he was always cadging her cigarettes, he filled her dressing room from floor to ceiling with cartons of them.
When the 1968 film version of The Odd Couple was being cast, Shelley and Evans were not initially in the frame as the Pigeons until Matthau told the producers that it simply would ‘‘not be the same with anyone else’’.
Shelley and Evans also reprised their roles in a small-screen spin-off from Simon’s play. ‘‘We were Pigeons for quite some time,’’ Shelley noted. ‘‘We got to look like each other after a while.’’
Their pairing was so successful that Disney recruited them to do voiceovers in the animated films The Aristocats, in which they were prim and proper English geese, and Robin Hood, in which Shelley was Lady Kluck, the lady-in-waiting to Evans’ Maid Marian.
Evans was Shelley’s maid of honour when in 1967 she married Albert Woods, the maitre d’hotel at Jim Downey’s Steakhouse, where they often ate after Broadway performances. He died in 1971. They had no children and she did not remarry.
Shelley remained in the United States for the rest of her life. She won a Tony award in 1979 for her portrayal of Mrs Kendal, the Victorian actress who befriended the disfigured Joseph Merrick – referred to as John in the script – in the Broadway production of The Elephant Man.
She won a nomination for another Tony award for her warm performance as Billy Elliot’s grandmother in the Broadway musical adaptation of Stephen Daldry’s film.
She later found favour with a new generation of theatregoers in Wicked ,a musical prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which she played Madame Morrible. Her final Broadway appearance came at the age of 75 in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder. Robustly cheerful to the end, Shelley claimed to have ‘‘had much more fun playing middle-aged and elderly ladies’’ than any other roles in her career.
She was born Carole Augusta Shelley in London. Her father, Curtis Shelley, was a Jewish composer of German origin and her mother, Deborah (nee Bloomstein), was an opera singer. They arrived in Britain shortly before the outbreak of World War II.
Shelley trained to become a ballet dancer, but switched to acting after an accident as a teenager. ‘‘God offered me a longer career by breaking my foot,’’ she joked.
At the age of 9 Shelley had a bit part in the 1949 film Give Us This Day and she later attended Regent Street Polytechnic, where she studied theatre design and millinery. She made her debut on the London stage at 18 years old and appeared in a couple of Carry On films before moving to New York.
Her forte was light comedy, yet she showed emotional nuance and dramatic subtlety in
The Elephant Man.
‘‘I felt I was not being used fully,’’ Shelley said at the time. ‘‘Not only wasn’t I plumbing my own depths, I didn’t even know if I had any real depths to plumb.’’
That she did was further evidenced when she played Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Regan in King Lear. It was ‘‘the most intensive deep-water swimming in my life,’’ Shelley remarked. ‘‘The clown was finally allowed to play Hamlet, so to speak.’’ –
The Times