Angela Baddeley

Angela Baddeley
Angela Baddeley, 1938
Born	Madeleine Angela Clinton-Baddeley (1904-07-04)4 July 1904 West Ham, London, England, UK
Died	22 February 1976(1976-02-22) (aged 71) Grayshott, Hampshire, England, UK
Occupation	Actress

Angela Baddeley, CBE (4 July 1904 – 22 February 1976) was an English stage and television actress, best-remembered for her role as household cook Mrs. Bridges in the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs. Her stage career lasted more than six decades.

Born as Madeleine Angela Clinton-Baddeley in West Ham, London in 1904 into a wealthy family, she would later base the character of Mrs. Bridges on one of the cooks her family employed. Her younger sister was actress Hermione Baddeley (1906–1986), who is known to American audiences for such appearances as on NBC's Little House on the Prairie.

In 1912, aged 8, Angela made her stage début at the Dalston Palace of Varieties, Dalston, in a play called The Dawn of Happiness. When she was nine, she auditioned at the Old Vic Theatre. In November 1915 she made her stage début at the Old Vic in Richard III, and she subsequently appeared in many other Shakespeare plays.

During her teenage years, the "consummate little actress", as a national paper had once called her when she was 10, starred in many musicals and pantomimes. She briefly 'retired' from acting at age 18. Her first marriage, to Stephen Thomas, produced one daughter. On 8 July 1929 she married actor/stage director Glen Byam Shaw; they had two children, a son and a daughter.

After spending some time touring in Australia, Baddeley established herself as a popular stage actress. At the beginning of the 1930s she appeared in two films, the Sherlock Holmes tale, The Speckled Band (1931), featuring Raymond Massey as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth, and in The Ghost Train (also 1931), a screen version of the successful stage thriller. Later in the decade, Baddeley had a role in the MGM-British film, The Citadel (1938), an adaptation of A. J. Cronin's novel directed by King Vidor. Throughout the 1940s, she played many strong female roles on stage, including Miss Prue in Love for Love and Nora in The Winslow Boy.