This Is Your Life: Stephanie Cole

Stephanie COLE (1941-)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Stephanie Cole, actress, was surprised by Michael Aspel during the curtain call of the play A Passionate Woman at the Comedy Theatre in central London.

Stephanie, who was born in Solihull but grew up in Devon, studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and made her professional stage debut at the age of 18 playing a 90-year-old character. She honed her acting skills at repertory theatres across the UK before briefly leaving the profession to teach drama while raising her daughter.

Having returned to acting in the mid-1970s, she combined theatre with television, notably appearing in the BBC drama series Tenko, the BBC sitcoms Open All Hours and Waiting for God and Alan Bennett's Talking Heads series of dramatic monologues.

"Bloody hell!"

programme details...

Edition No: 900
Subject No: 884
Broadcast date: Wed 21 Dec 1994
Broadcast time: 7.00-7.30pm
Recorded: Wed 16 Nov 1994
Venue: unknown
Series: 35
Edition: 8
Code name: Mine

on the guest list...

Emma - daughter
June - mother
Peter - brother
Paul - brother
cast members of Waiting For God
Neil Morrissey
James Gaddas
Alfred Lynch
Ned Sherrin
Janine Duvitski
Daniel Hill
Ruth Tester-Brown
Patricia Brake
Ariel Bruce
Wiggy - half-sister
Burt Kwouk
Veronica Roberts
Joanna Hole
Ann Bell
Louise Jameson
Ann Queensberry
Jean Anderson
Stephanie Beacham
Christopher Godwin
Michael Jayston
Nicola Pagett
Peter Baldwin
Sister Angela
Graham Crowden
Peggy - aunt
Rudi Shelly

production team...

Researcher: Sally Millson
Writer: Norman Giller
Director: Brian Klein
Associate Producer: John Graham
Executive Producer: Peter Estall
Producer: Malcolm Morris

names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

related pages...

An Actor's Life For Me

spotlight on the stars

Jean Anderson

Stephanie Beacham

Ned Sherrin

Screenshots of Stephanie Cole This Is Your Life

Stephanie Cole recalls her experience of This Is Your Life in her autobiography, A Passionate Life...

On the final curtain call we were waiting for the curtain to fall, but it didn't, and in my peripheral vision I saw a man coming from the wings. I thought that it was John Berger, our company manager, and that something had happened. Then I realised that it was Michael Aspel with the Big Red Book. I thought it must be for Neil, but I looked at him and no, it wasn't. Well then, it must be Jimmy. No. It must be Alfie. No. Michael approached me, the audience laughed and cheered, and I was so genuinely caught out that I am sorry to have to confess that I am one of the few people who, on being presented with the Big Red Book, responded with an unprintable — and untransmittable - expletive deleted. I apologised to the BBC producer afterwards, and she said that I was not to worry as they would cut it out, but they didn't. You couldn't hear it, but anyone with any lip-reading skills could have seen very clearly what I was saying.

I was completely taken by surprise. My mother and Emma had been secretly working with the researcher for weeks. Afterwards I managed to piece together clues that I probably should have picked up, but because I was working so hard, I hadn't. For instance, Emma had had a friend to stay a couple of nights, and one morning they were both looking terribly bleary-eyed. I said to them, 'What have you two been up to?' and they said, 'Oh, we sat up talking until four in the morning.' What they had actually been doing - Emma having crept into my bedroom and taken my Filofax out of my handbag when I was asleep - was sitting up until four in the morning, copying out all the names and addresses of my friends. Then my mother came to stay and casually asked to borrow back some of the albums of photographs and reviews - she and Great-Aunt Peg have been the family archivists over the years, collecting all the cuttings, but they have always handed over the completed albums for me to keep. She said she needed them to show to two very old friends who were coming to stay. I didn't think anything was peculiar about that either. I just said that of course she could take them home. They, too, were riffled through by the researcher, and photographs removed.

My mother and Emma had been brilliant about insisting that they not only include famous names, but other people who they knew I'd really want to see. So as well as the Tenko gels and my friends from Waiting for God, and Rudi Shelley, we had Sister Angela, my Great-Aunt Peg, my brothers came over from Keynsham, and they flew Wigs over from America.

I was sure that Sister Angela would be on a film clip, but on she came at the end, in her brown Poor Clare robes and sandals, saying 'Hallo, darling!' as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

Angela has been very involved in work on the new feminist theology being done by an American university, and had gone over there to lecture for a couple of terms a few years earlier. They had asked her to go back for a reunion, and she was in the chapel at her convent, talking to God about it and saying, 'I know I can't afford it, but I want to go, and if I'm meant to go, show me if there's a way.'

At that moment the telephone rang. It was a Friday, and a voice said, 'This is the BBC in London. Are you busy just now?'

And she said, 'Well, I'm preparing my sermon for Sunday?'

They said, 'Ah... Do you have to do it?'

'Why?'

'Because we want you to fly to England on Sunday to be on Stephanie Cole's This is Your Life.'

She immediately said, 'Oh, yes, I'll come for Steph.'

They told her she would be able to pick up her return ticket to England at the airport, and she thought very quickly and said, 'The ticket from Australia to England and back - could I cash it in and get a "round the world"?' They said that she could, and that's what she did. She flew to England, appeared on This Is Your Life, flew on to America for her reunion, and then back home to Australia, all for the same price, courtesy of the BBC.

After the recording, we all partied on until four in the morning. When we came downstairs, the poor cabbies who had been booked for us were all sound asleep at their wheels. This was in 1995, when Great-Aunt Peg was ninety-five, and too frail to travel all the way to London. They had sent a film crew down to the Harriet Nanscowen Home in Braunton, North Devon, where she lived. She was then a little more compos mentis than she was by the end of her life, but even so they had to do thirty-seven takes. At the end, when they thought they had probably just about got enough to put something together for a thirty-second clip, they told her, 'Thank you very much, Miss Hirst. We've finished now.' To which, Great-Aunt Peg replied, 'Well! Thank heavens for that! If that's television - I won't be doing any more.'

Series 35 subjects