The sultry tones that won 1950s radio actress a surprise fortune Twist in the tale for forgotten Midland entertainer who mesmerised listeners
SHE has been largely forgotten, but for decades Marjorie Westbury was the voice of radio – and one who had an amazing windfall bestowed upon her by one diehard fan.
Born in Langley Green, Oldbury, Westbury gained fame as the sidekick to sleuth Paul Temple, starring in the popular series of the same name.
Westbury was the voice of the unusually named ‘Steve’, wife of crime writer Temple, a man constantly called on by police to solve baffling crimes.
But, in real life, the actress’s life took an even more unexpected twist.
One elderly woman was such a fan of ‘Steve’ that she decided to leave her entire fortune to Westbury in her will.
The pair met up and Westbury did her damndest to dissuade her fan, but the woman would have none of it.
When the elderly fan died, Westbury was left comfortably off and the cash allowed her to pick and choose her parts.
It sounds unkind, but Westbury – who was born on June 15, 1905 – had a good face for radio.
She was small and stout, leading fellow radio actor Martin Jarvis to describe her as “a small, bunshaped, grey-haired woman who danced up to the microphone with phenomenal energy”.
In fact, w h e n Paul Temple, created by writer Francis Durbridge, was turned into a TV series, but Westbury was deemed unsuitable for the small screen adaption.
Westbur y stud ied singing at London’s Royal College of Music between 1927 and 1930, and made her debut on the radio show in Paul Temple Intervenes, broadcast from October to December 1942. Actor Carl Bernard played Temple. Producer Martyn C Webster was so impressed that he handed the Black Country actress the plum role of ‘Steve’ three years later. Her first serial was Send For Paul Temple Again, broadcast from September to November 1945.
This time she played opposite Barry Morse’s Paul Temple. Westbury went on to play the part until the last series in 1968.
There was certainly no trace of the rather frumpish local woman in her vampish alter-ego.
In his 2012 book Hello Again: Nine Decades of Radio Voices, Simon Elmes wrote: “Marjorie Westbury’s ‘Steve’, with her sexually ambiguous name, was part Bondgirl, part sensible voice of rea
son. But, above all, she was frankly sexy. And this is where the alchemy of radio comes into play because Westbury was an actress blessed with a voice that utterly belied her age.
“Born just five years after the start of the 20th century, she had reached comfortable middle age when the Paul Temple mysteries were at their height of popularity in the mid-1950s yet, sublimely, her dusky, delicate tones remained convincingly those of a seductive young woman in her mid-20s.”
The radio series came to an end when the BBC made the series for TV, which ran from 1969 to 1971. Both Westbury and Coke were judged unsuitable to play the detective couple on screen and the roles were taken by Francis Matthews and Ros Drinkwater.
In April 1959, Westbury appeared on Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley, where her favourite piece of music was Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tuti (Act 1 Trio), and her book was James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
In the early 1960s, she recorded a number of talking books for children, with selections of singing games and stories by Alison Uttley.
In 1968, she was the voice of the spiders in the BBC’s radio adaptation of The Hobbit and in 1975 she was the narrator of BBC TV’s Girls of Slender Means.
Westbury continued acting on radio into the 1980s. She died at her Sussex farmhouse home on December 16, 1989, at the age of 84.
But to her countless fans she will always be sultry Steve.