Carole Shelley
British actress best known as one of the chirruping Pigeon sisters in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple
CAROLE SHELLEY, who has died aged 79, was a Tony Award-winning actress who made her name as one of the giggling Pigeon sisters in the stage, film and television versions of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.
She made her Broadway debut in 1965 – in one of the play’s most memorably toe-curling scenes – as the coyly chirruping young English redhead Gwendolyn Pigeon, who with her equally daffy sister Cecily (Monica Evans) goes on a double date with their neighbours, the neurotic Felix and slobbish Oscar, played by Art Carney and Walter Matthau.
Oscar, who has been desperately trying to lift the mood with a barrage of flirtatious one-liners, returns, all smiles, from mixing the drinks – “Is evry-buddy happy?!” – to find the Pigeons sobbing into their handkerchiefs after hearing Felix’s account of his disintegrating marriage.
A New York critic hailed the sister act as “a triumph”, and they reprised their roles in the 1968 film adaptation, starring Matthau and Jack Lemmon. The studio had planned to use contract players until Matthau told them: “You must employ the two girls. It isn’t the same with anyone else.” They also appeared in the first series of the television spin-off starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall.
The two British actresses were the only performers to appear in all three versions: “We were Pigeons for quite some time,” Shelley remarked. “We got to look like each other after a while.”
They later worked together in two Disney animated films, voicing geese – the Gabble Sisters – in The Aristocats (1970), and as Maid Marian and her lady-inwaiting in Robin Hood (1973), both times in nods to the Pigeon sisters.
Carole Shelley said she adored working with Matthau, who would try to get the “sisters” to corpse whenever his back was to the audience. He continually pestered her for cigarettes, and, after she complained, filled her dressing room with cartons of them.
She won her Tony award for her performance as Mrs Kendal, the actress who befriends John Merrick, in the 1979 Broadway production of The Elephant Man. “I’ve learnt a lot in playing her,” she said at the time. “So much of what I’ve been working toward in the past few years – the effort to achieve stillness, spareness, clarity in my acting – seems to have come together in Mrs Kendal. She’s been quite an extraordinary influence in my life.”
Carole Shelley was born on August 16 1939 in London, the daughter of Deborah (née Bloomstein), a Russian-jewish opera singer, and Curtis Shelley, a German-jewish composer. Her aspirations to be a ballerina ended when she broke a foot, and she turned to acting, appearing in Edward Dmytryk’s 1949 drama Give Us This Day, set in New York but shot in Britain.
She appeared in other British films such as It’s Great to Be Young (1956), Carry On Regardless (1961) and Carry On Cabby (1963), then got her big break when Neil Simon was in London to look after a production of his musical Little Me and was looking for actresses to play the Pigeon sisters, having found no one suitable on the other side of the Atlantic.
Carole Shelley settled in America and her other theatre roles in New York included Absurd Person Singular, Stepping Out and the grandmother in Billy Elliot: The Musical, for all of which she received Tony nominations.
She appeared on screen in films including The Boston Strangler (1968) and The Road to Wellville (1994), as well as playing Aunt Clara in the film adaptation of Bewitched (2005), starring Nicole Kidman, while on television her appearances over the years included parts in The Avengers, The Cosby Show and Frasier.
She began appearing in musicals when she was asked by Hal Prince to replace Elaine Stritch in the 1994 revival of Show Boat, and she went on to play Fraulein Schneider, who runs the boarding house in Cabaret. In 2003 she originated the role of the headmistress Madame Morrible in the Broadway hit Wicked. Her final bow on Broadway came in 2013 in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.
In 1967 Carole Shelley married Albert Woods, becoming a US citizen in 1969; he died in 1971. There were no children of the marriage.