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Meriel Forbes Actress of wit and charm, with and without Ralph Richardson Eric Shorter Monday April 17, 2000 The Guardian Although Meriel Forbes, who has died aged 86, later became better known as Sir Ralph Richardson's beloved wife, "Mu" - famous for tolerating his assorted whims, from motorcycles to uncaged pet parrots - she had earned a reputation on the West End stage as one of its busiest and most accomplished actresses long before they met. She was also one of the stage's most attractive exponents of light comedy. After ending her engagement to the actor Robert Morley, who considered her insufficiently ambitious, she took up with the matinée idol Robert Donat, and played his wife on tour and in the West End - during the same season that she first encountered Richardson. Meriel was born into one of the best-known British acting families. The daughter of Frank Forbes-Robertson and niece of the great Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, she was educated in Eastbourne, Brussels and Paris. No one was surprised when, at 16, she made her professional debut with her father's touring company in York, as Mrs De Hooley in Jerome K Jerome's The Passing Of The Third Floor Back. Then came two stints in rep, one in Dundee, the other in Birmingham, before touring in Ronald Mackenzie's Musical Chairs, and understudying (and playing) the fluffy and flirtatious Kitty Packard in Kaufman and Ferber's Dinner At Eight (1933). For the next seven years, Forbes was never out of work, which ranged from comedies and thrillers to musicals and Terence Rattigan's first play, First Episode, in 1934. It was two years later, while auditioning with another actress at the Haymarket theatre for The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse, that Ralph Richardson chose her for the part of a gangster's moll. He was to star as a psychologist-turned- criminologist, and pointing to the vivacious Forbes, he said: "I like that one." As Clitterhouse's "dark and spirited, and smartly dressed assistant, Daisy" Forbes caught critical attention in a production which ran for nearly 500 performances. The Richardsons did not act again together for another 12 years. He was already married to Muriel "Kit" Hewitt, an actress but an invalid. She had developed the disease encephalitis lethargica (sleeping sickness). Although Forbes might not possess high ambition or wide range, as Morley had once brusquely pointed out, she was always in work, and her vivacity held an irresistible charm for an actor of Richardson's artistic standing and domestic predicament. Besides, she had won admiration over the years for her lightness of touch, exquisite timing, spirited personality and her way of humanising otherwise over-sweet characters, like Sheridan's Julia in The Rivals at the Old Vic in 1938. Forbes had also shown an engaging, caustic line in dry comedy as Crystal Allen in The Women (1940), and had stolen notices in the small part of the housemaid Milly Smith in Reginald Beckwith's A Soldier For Christmas (1944). As the barmaid opposite Richardson in RC Sherriff's Home At Seven (1950), her part may only have lasted 10 minutes, but within that time she was said to have "unlocked with charm and vivacity the key to the plot". In another play by Sherriff, The White Carnation, Forbes drew from Kenneth Tynan the epithet "winsome", as a London librarian with whom Richardson fell in love. Indeed, the Richardsons, who married in 1944 (two years after the death of Muriel Hewitt), were to play many parts together, from Romilly Cavan's ruritanian comedy, Royal Circle (1948) to a tour of Australia in two Rattigan plays, Separate Tables and The Sleeping Prince, and Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry, in which Forbes took over from Wendy Hiller as the long-suffering wife of Richardson's dreamy suburban husband. They were together again in the West End in The School For Scandal in 1962, with her as Lady Sneerwell to his blustering Sir Peter Teazle, roles which they also acted on Broadway. In 1964, they played Bottom and Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream on a tour of South America and Europe. One of their last plays together came in the 1970s, Lloyd George Knew My Father, with Forbes replacing Peggy Ashcroft. Among her own personal successes were The Philadelphia Story (1949), Shaw's The Millionairess (1952), and The Waltz Of The Toreadors (New York, 1957). Forbes's film appearances included Oh! What A Lovely War, and, on television, she was Lady Constance in the series Blandings Castle. Sir Ralph Richardson died in 1983. Their only son, Charles, also predeceased Forbes. • Meriel Forbes, actress, born September 13 1913; died April 7 2000 |