Frances Cuka
Actress whose career began on Children’s Hour and ended as Grandma in Friday Night Dinner
FRANCES CUKA, who has died age 83, had a long acting career that started when she was allowed, once a week, to bunk off school early to work on Children’s Hour.
It continued, via the West End stage and television, with a couple of film roles, until, as Grandma in the Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner, she jilted her dreadful fiancé Mr Morris by feigning a heart attack when she reached the wedding canopy in the synagogue.
In between she played Katherine of Aragon in the film Henry VIII and his Six Wives, Nell in a dustbin in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at the Royal Court, and a range of parts with the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. She also took numerous roles on the West End stage and on television.
Frances Cuka was born in London on August 21 1936 to Joseph Cuka, a process engraver of Czech origin, and his wife Letitia, a tailor. The family moved to Brighton when she was young. From Brighton and Hove Grammar School for Girls she attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
After a stint in rep at Warrington in 1955 she joined Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in Stratford, east London in 1957. When Miss
Littlewood staged Macbeth, setting the action in a modern militarised state, Frances Cuka was cast as Lady Macduff, recalling that an audience of Teddy Boys shrieked when her character was shot dead offstage. She toured with the production to Zurich and Moscow.
In 1958 Shelagh Delaney, then an unknown playwright, sent Joan Littlewood the script of A Taste of Honey. Featuring prostitution, alcoholism, illegitimacy, underage sex, mixed race liaisons and homosexuality, then illegal, it broke every taboo of the day. Joan Littlewood immediately sent for Frances Cuka to play the central character, Jo, a sulky Salford teenager, neglected by her alcoholic mother, impregnated by a black sailor and given temporary sanctuary by a gay man.
The play was a huge success, moving to the West End and then Broadway. It was later made into a film starring Rita Tushingham.
After several hundred performances Frances Cuka was ready for a change, hence Endgame at the Royal Court, West End roles, and a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, when she appeared in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Sean O’casey’s The Silver Tassie, and two Pinter plays.
In Trevor Nunn’s production of Nicholas Nickleby, where she played Mrs Nickleby, she accidentally fell off a chair and into a basket, which amused the audience, though not Mr Nunn.
On television she appeared in a dozen or more plays and in numerous series including The Bill, Casualty, Crown Court, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries and Holby City. When auditioning for Casualty she was offered two roles, that of a potty aristocrat or Mrs Bassey, an obstreperous bag lady. She took the latter and was duly seen attacking charge nurse Charlie with a frozen chicken.
Her last television role, as Grandma in Friday Night Dinner, brought out the best of her comic talent. It continued until she had a stroke, aged 80, but the scriptwriters included her in one last episode as a voice on the phone.
Though not the most numerate of people, Frances Cuka was for more than a decade treasurer of the north-west London branch of Equity, whose members always looked forward to her ribald financial reports.
Frances Cuka was funny, self-deprecating and a fund of interesting stories. She read widely and liked food, cooking and theatre. She once refused to go into a pub with friends, explaining that she had been thrown out of it with Peter O’toole and had been barred for life.
In hospital after her stroke three years ago, she was asked by a doctor if she knew where she was. “I’m in a f-----g hospital,” she replied. “Are you an idiot?”
She was unmarried.
Frances Cuka, born August 21 1936, died February 16 2020