She was a child of the sixties but a woman ahead of her time
YOU MAY know Fenella Fielding for her beautiful readings of Euripides, her highly acclaimed Hedda Gabler, her Nora in A Doll’s House or her wonderful gift for 17th century restoration comedy and Oscar Wilde. But probably you do not. Though she did these things wonderfully well and treasured them, they certainly are not what made her famous.
Most of us know her for her irresistible voice, so deep, so rich, so provocative and, at the same time so very witty — often imitated but actually inimitable. The title of her memoir, published last year, is Do You Mind If I Smoke? recalling what perhaps was, for better or worse, her most unforgettable moment.
The year was 1966, the film was Carry
On Screaming — Fenella, playing Valeria Watt, white face, black hair, body poured into a red velvet dress and sinuously decorating a chaise longue, she was so comically, overpoweringly sexy her whole body literally smoked. Nobody was as provocative/funny as Fenella, which is why, besides excelling in Ibsen, she was a favourite on television with Eric and Ernie in the plays what Ernie wrote.
But whatever she did, she was never a sexual object. She wasn’t the butt of humour, she was the one in control, which was very much as it should be, because in life Fenella Fielding was an emancipated woman.
She had to emancipate herself in both her family and her trade. Her mother had come from Romania in her mid-teens and her father, from Lithuania, had been in London as a baby. His father was a butcher and he started his working life there.
Later, he managed a cinema and did well in the underwear business. She was born (as Fenella Feldman) in Clapton, north-east London but in the 1940s the family moved to Edgware. Her elder brother, Basil, became an enormously successful businessman and a Conservative peer (Fenella’s politics were left-wing but she did say she quite liked Margaret Thatcher when she met her).
She said her father used to hit her. “I’d rather see you dead at my feet than going to university,” he told her. She did go to excellent schools, then to Rada but left after a year and combined art school with secretarial college. She was busy working in fashionable night clubs, singing and dancing, but it was meeting Ron Moody, then a student at the LSE, and appearing in a review he wrote that was her break. That was in 1952.
In the late 1950s she was brilliant in the Sandy Wilson musical Valmouth and that made her a star, taking her into the West End review shows – an ideal vehicle for her talents, her sharpness, her wit and her enormously engaging personality. In Pieces of Eight, written by Peter Cook and Harold Pinter, she co-starred with Kenneth Williams. It was a tremendous success.
The paths of the master and mistress of sexual double entendre crossed later in Carry On films and rather wonderfully at least once on Just A Minute but their relationship was not the smoothest. Of Williams in Pieces of Eight she says: “He was very difficult to work with. When he felt like it, it was just bliss. But he could be hideous. It was a very tricky time. I used to be innocent. I used to be trusting. But after 18 months of that...”
It put her on her mettle. All her life she was an independent woman, writing and injecting her own material into shows before women did that kind of thing.
She was part of the free-thinking, free-flowing sixties, coiffing at Vidal Sassoon, quaffing in Soho with Jeffrey Bernard and living a single-woman life of which we know little.
She was always dignified and discreet. She never married, though she did say that for two decades she ran two lovers in tandem, one of them married, without either knowing about the other.
Late in life, she still looked, sounded and remained very much Fenella. She became a minor cult (the rock star Jarvis Cocker included her in the London South Bank Meltdown festival alongside Grace Jones) but compared with other brilliant actresses of her generation, she was undervalued. She was a one-off and an OBE but nothing like a dame.
For two decades she ran two lovers in tandem’