A CLASS ACT IN EVERY WAY

On the centenary of her birth, Robert Ross celebrates the prodigious talent of character actress Marianne Stone who squeezed maximum fun from minor roles

- Robert Ross

In The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, Peter Davison’s brilliant comedy homage for Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary, omnipresent actress Olivia Colman bemoans the fact she isn’t in the official celebration, The Day of the Doctor. After all, she says: “I’m usually in everything!” It’s a joke picked up in the reboot of Spitting Image too, but 50 years ago, it’s a crack that could have readily come out of the mouth of Marianne Stone.

Indeed, in that single year of 1972 Marianne’s screen credits took in her usual range, from exploitation horror (as the nurse in Jim O’Connolly’s Tower of Evil) to bawdy comedy (as Mrs Fairfax in Val Guest’s Au Pair Girls). On television she notched up an episode of the Rupert Davies television series thriller The Man Outside: Hawk Street Horror, and one of disturbing anthology chiller Dead of Night: Two in the Morning.

There were two episodes of Thames Television situation comedy for producer William G Stewart (Father, Dear Father: The Cardboard Casanova, and Bless This House: Wives and Lovers). And that same year, Peter Rogers cast her as unscrupulous white elephant stallholder Muriel in his feature film version of Bless This House. Marianne had long been a beloved part of the producer’s repertory company. Indeed, 1972 also saw Marianne take on the less-than-taxing role of “distressed woman in pub” in Rogers’s hard-hitting social drama All Coppers Are… Marianne would have cropped up in his other 1972 offering Carry On Matron, too, if only her eccentric cameo as maternity patient Mrs Putzova had not hit the cutting-room floor.