Lady Grade
Teenage star who gave up her career to become a steady presence behind her tycoon husband Lew
LADY GRADE, who has died aged 100, was a rising teenage singing star when she met the young talent agent and future impresario Lew Grade, and was credited with introducing him not only to television but also to the outrageously large cigars that became his trademark.
As a pretty ingénue with no formal training, she caught Grade’s eye as he considered teaming her with a trio of comic acrobats before deciding the act was unsuitable for her. Instead Kathy Moody (as she was) pursued a singing and acting career, eventually graduating from provincial touring shows to the West End and enjoying star billing on wartime radio in the weekly Variety Bandbox.
Billed as Kathy Moody “the Singing Starlet”, she appeared in the first British television show to be broadcast after the war, and contemplated training as an operatic soprano, but decided to dedicate herself to being Mrs Lew Grade. Her BBC producer, Cecil Madden, was in no doubt that had she continued as a performer she could have become “a very big star”.
As it was, she became a constant helpmeet to Lew, the larger-than-life mogul some 15 years her senior, from whom she was seldom separated for more than half a century of married life. Invalided out of the Army with water on the knee, he had been an energetic dancer as a young man, winning the World Charleston Championship at the Royal Albert Hall, while she, untutored, had danced and sung as a girl with an ambition to make a career on the stage.
Their backgrounds were markedly different. While she came from a large Catholic family in Manchester, he was Jewish, the son of poor Russian immigrants. Throughout their marriage, Kathy remained her husband’s greatest fan, and unblinkingly insisted that he could have been Pope had he been born Catholic (“that’s the kind of faith she has in me,” he once told the Telegraph). She ran the couple’s penthouse flat in Knightsbridge, which they latterly shared with Kathy’s younger sister Norah, a one-time stage impressionist.
While Lew treated it as an extension of his nearby office, her own desk was the powerhouse for her charity work. She chaired the Alexandra Rose project, raised funds for the YWCA, and was a council member of the Royal Albert Hall. She was an early campaigner for Motability, providing transport for the disabled.
Her workaholic husband had telephones fitted throughout the flat with three unlisted numbers. As Hunter Davies noted in his family biography The Grades (1981), Kathy never knew one of the numbers because he wanted the line kept permanently clear in case someone important wanted to get straight through.
When the chauffeur of his Rolls-royce Phantom VI was sick or away, Kathy would drive her husband to his office off Oxford Street in her own car. In the 1970s she managed to break his habit of going in every Saturday morning to open the post. Like her husband, she disdained holidays. The couple would spend Christmas week in a suite at the Dorchester to avoid the trouble of travelling, packing bags, catching planes and carrying passports.
She always saw him off at the airport on business trips, and would pick him up on his return, no matter how late the hour. “It’s just one of the little things I’ve always done. To me, it’s the ideal marriage.”
The eighth of nine children, Kathleen Sheila Moody was born on June 23 1921 into a Roman Catholic family in Didsbury, south Manchester, and made her first stage appearance at the age of three in a local cinema singing between the silent films. She had, she recalled, “a most unusual” voice, and in the early 1930s she inveigled her way into Gracie Fields’s dressing room and impressed her with her coloratura renditions of Sally and Sing as We Go. Turning professional when she was 12, she joined a touring variety act called Beams Breazy Babes. At 15 she was principal boy in pantomime at Birkenhead, and a year later went to London to join a variety bill topped by the comedian Ted Ray.
In 1939 she appeared as Bo Peep in Little Red Riding Hood (Kilburn Empire). By 1941 The Stage was acclaiming her “youth, good looks, and pleasant voice” on a wartime variety bill at the Finsbury Park Empire. Sitting on a bucket in the wings when she returned to the same venue after the war to star in pantomime was her young nephew Michael (now Lord) Grade, relishing his first taste of the entertainment industry.
In late 1938 Lew Grade had befriended a three-handed comedy act called the Diamond Brothers, and suggested they put on a revue together, but they lacked a leading lady. After Kathy, then 17, had auditioned for his then partner Joe Collins (father of Joan), Lew told her he thought she looked too young, although he actually thought the act included too much rough and tumble. Later, when Lew saw her in Leicester Square, he invited her to watch him play table tennis, and they were engaged in 1940.
They married on her 21st birthday in June 1942, but Lew Grade’s mother, Olga, refused to attend, disappointed that her son had married a non-jewish bride. Later she relented, and regarded her daughter-in-law as “a really wonderful woman”. When the couple moved into a flat in Cavendish Square, Kathy earned a reputation as a hostess and cook, entertaining guests including the singer Alma Cogan and the comedian Arthur Askey.
Having appeared as a singer on radio she was booked to take part in the first variety programme when television resumed in June 1946. Kathy’s sister Phyllis had been in hospital and Lew arranged for an old Baird television set to be delivered to the ward so that she could watch the show. This was said to have been Lew Grade’s first encounter with the small screen. His wife made her final TV appearance on Boxing Night 1950 when she took the part of principal boy in Cinderella on BBC Television, with Sally Ann Howes in the title role.
According to Lew Grade, it was his wife who introduced him to outsized cigars, which he found gave him confidence when dealing with stars. Kathy had bought him a box of Montecristos to offer visitors to his theatrical agency, hoping that it would help to put him at ease, but they remained unopened in his bottom desk drawer before he lit one up and found he enjoyed it. “That,” he declared, “was the day the real Lew Grade was born.”
Kathy Grade also encouraged her husband when he joined a consortium called ITC to bid for the new ITV programmes franchise in 1955. Grade warned his wife that she might have to sell her jewellery to finance the bid. Grade’s team, including his younger brother Leslie, also a talent agent, were initially turned down, because they were already considered too powerful in the theatrical world, but with the original backers running out of cash, Lew Grade and Val Parnell stepped in to recoup the losses.
“I had no fears about the money,” Kathy Grade recalled. “I had worked out which bits of furniture and objects I would sell next, if we had to, but Lew always had great confidence that it would all work out.”
After her mother’s death at the age of 95, her husband bought the Ivy restaurant, where the couple had their first date, as a present for his wife. He was created a life peer in 1976, and died in 1998. Their adopted son died in 2012.
Lady Grade, born June 23 1921, died January 1 2022