A STALWART of West End musicals, Stella Moray was a musical comedy actress much associated with the Players Theatre. She also had a long career in television, appearing in a variety of sitcoms, including Steptoe and Son, Robin’s Nest and George and Mildred.
Born Stella Morris in 1923 her first taste of showbusiness came when she joined the ATS during the Second World War. She was a featured singer with the Ordnance Corps Band and later joined the Stars in Battledress unit where she came to the notice of the Black brothers, George and Alfred, London’s most powerful variety impresarios.
She sang with the Melanchrino Orchestra in Merry-Go-Round, a weekly radio programme for the Forces and later was sent to the Far East on tour in a show called Jamboree, starring Reg Varney. At one point on the tour she and two other girls in the show were separated from the men and billeted in the infamous Changi barracks, part of the notorious Changi jail where British soldiers were held by the Japanese. “Those were pretty rough digs,” she said.
After the war she changed her surname to Moray and got her first break appearing in Humpty Dumpty (London Casino, 1946) with Vic Oliver and Julie Andrew. Her first musical was Belinda Fair (Saville, 1949), in which she played a supporting role, but she came to the public eye the following year when she was cast as Augusta in the long-running operetta Wild Violets (Stoll Theatre). Her co-star Ian Carmichael described Moray as “an attractive, slim, dark-haired young lass”.
She appeared in numerous music hall and variety productions at the Players Theatre and in 1960 played Cleo in The Most Happy Fella (London Coliseum). Two years later she was Maimie Candijack in Noël Coward’s Sail Away (Savoy) and also acted as standby for the show’s star Elaine Stritch. She was Madam Kleopatra Mamayev in House of Cards (Phoenix, 1963), opposite Douglas Byng, but one of her biggest successes came when she appeared in the hit musical Robert and Elizabeth (Lyric, 1964) in which she sang The Girls that Boys Dream About.
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Her comic flair was much in evidence when she played Mrs Strakosh in Funny Girl (Prince of Wales, 1966), opposite Barbra Streisand, and other notable theatre credits included The Pursuit of Love (Bristol Old Vic, 1967) and Bordello (Queens, 1974). In 1980 she was a formidable Mrs Hannigan, the hard-hearted orphanage matron in Annie (Victoria Palace).
She was a familiar face on TV screens in the Sixties, playing Ivy Meacher in the soap Crossroads and more recently she had character roles in Arthur’s Dyke (2001) and The Last Detective (2003).
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Stella Moray, actress, was born on July 29, 1923. She died on August 6, 2006, aged 83.