Honor didn’t want to be seen as a bimbo.. her beauty was powerful
They were on a bus one day and he said, ‘When we’re married you’ll have to give up all this theatre nonsense’. And Honor said she literally got off the bus and never saw him again.
“She knew the theatre was something she couldn’t give up. She was always strong-willed and knew her own mind.”
The actress learnt to stand up for herself early. Born in London’s East End, in 1925, one of four siblings, her father, Frederick, was a civil servant, but the family didn’t have much money, sharing two bedrooms and an outside loo.
Her father’s draconian temper could have extinguished her spirit.
Honor always refused to write an autobiography but Richard, 79, directed her many times and posed the questions in Honor’s onePRIVATE She opened up on stage woman shows that shared her life story late in her career.
He describes her recollections of a tyrannical upbringing, saying: “There was a kind of Victorian discipline in the household. Her father was plainly a disciplinarian. He had been in the trenches, but I think he almost never talked about it. “[The beatings] were hinted at and talked about briefly, but never, ever discussed. I think his approval mattered a great deal.” Although a private person, Honor once suggested her “subservient” mother should have left. She said: “I think if my husband had beaten my children like my father beat us on a couple of occasions… well, you say you would have left him, but in those days one didn’t.”
The impact on her personality was to develop a sense of nothing ever being good enough.
Plus a tremendous work ethic, which was behind her acting well into her later years, taking TV roles in sitcom The Upper Hand in the nineties, and later Coronation Street.
“I suppose that’s part of one’s upbringing. If you always feel, ‘That’s not good enough,’ you turn into Little Miss Perfectionist,” she said.
Richard agrees “she was hard on herself quite often”. He says: “She was never absolutely certain, was this good enough?, she always wanted it to be better.”
Yet Honor’s father’s demanding nature helped her, too. For her 15th birthday he offered her the choice of a bike, or elocution lessons. She knew there wasn’t really a choice.
The lessons opened her eyes to acting, leading to her studying parttime during the war, while working as a dispatch rider for the Home Office. Move over, Cathy Gale.
“The roar of the motorbike engine used to drown out the sound of the doodlebugs so we never heard them coming,” she said.
After the war she won an acting job as an understudy at the West End’s Criterion theatre, and in 1947 achieved