Irene Handl

Irene Handl
Irene Handl in the 1966 BBC TV comedy Mums Boys
Born	27 December 1901(1901-12-27) Maida Vale, London, England, UK
Died	29 November 1987 (aged 85) Kensington, London, England, UK

Irene Handl (27 December 1901 – 29 November 1987) was an English actress.

1 Life
2 Films
3 Theatre
4 Television
5 Selected filmography
6 External links

Life

Irene Handl was born in Maida Vale, London, the daughter of an Austrian banker father and French mother. She took to acting at the relatively advanced age of 36, and studied at the acting school run by the sister of Dame Sybil Thorndike. She made her London stage debut in February 1937 and appeared in over a hundred British films in supporting roles, mostly comedy character parts such as slightly eccentric mothers, grannies, landladies and servants. Among many stage appearances, she played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1975, directed by Jonathan Miller. She died in Kensington in 1987 and is buried at the Golders Green Crematorium.

Films

Handl had very minor roles in such landmark films as Night Train to Munich Spellbound and Brief Encounter. Her notable appearances included I'm All Right Jack as the wife of Peter Sellers' union leader Fred Kite, Tony Hancock's landlady in The Rebel and Sherlock Holmes' housekeeper Mrs. Hudson in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. She had small roles in two of the Carry On series (Nurse and Constable).

Theatre

Played the hilarious comic lead in Goodnight Mrs Puffin.

Television

On television she appeared as a guest in a number of comedy series, notably as a regular in the 1958 series Educating Archie and later in Maggie and Her (1978) opposite Julia McKenzie. In the early 1980s, she played Gran in the ITV children's comedy show Metal Mickey. She appeared in a rare aristocratic role in Mapp and Lucia and as another aristocratic character in Eric Sykes' 1982 television film It's Your Move where her chauffeur was played by Brian Murphy.

Her last appearance was in the BBC sitcom In Sickness and in Health in 1987. She died in Kensington, London later that year. She never married. It is noted in the published diaries of Kenneth Williams that Handl appeared and/or was in the audience of an episode of the chat show "Wogan" in 1987 (being hosted by Williams, as happened periodically) and that Handl was in a wheelchair. He recalls just a few days later that Handl had died. The fact that her appearance in In Sickness and in Health is credited as her final role is no doubt due to it being screened after her death.

In addition to her acting career, she wrote two successful novels: The Sioux (1965) and The Gold Tip Pfizer (1966).