Gillian Lewis (born 1935) is an English character actress who, after a varied stage career in the 1950s and early '60s, appeared in a number of television drama series until the late 1970s. Notable roles were as the runaway heiress Geraldine Melford in the original London production of Slade and Reynolds' musical Free as Air and, on television, as Drusilla Lamb, secretary to Mr. Rose in the detective series of that name.
Early stage career Gillian Lewis was born in Tisbury, Wiltshire.Biographical note in Theatre Royal, Brighton programme for Difference of Opinion (January 1965). She trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and then worked with the company, combining minor acting parts with the job of assistant stage manager. In 1953 she had a supporting role (Cousin Rosie) in Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds' Christmas musical The Merry Gentleman at the Theatre Royal, Bristol and the following year worked backstage at the Vaudeville Theatre in London when Slade and Reynolds' Salad DaysTheatre Royal programme for Difference of Opinion, loc.cit. transferred there from Bristol.Oxford Companion to Popular Music (1991).
While working with the Ipswich Repertory Company, she met her future husband, the actor Peter Beton (born 1930).
Free as Air (1957) In 1957, after Slade and Reynolds had enjoyed considerable acclaim with Salad Days, Lewis and Patricia Bredin (who in the same year was the United Kingdom's first ever entrant to the Eurovision Song Contest) took the main female roles in their follow-up show, Free as Air, which opened at the Savoy Theatre in London on 6 June 1957 following an initial season in Manchester. Although this and other Slade musicals never quite matched the success of Salad Days,See, for example, Oxford Companion to Popular Music (1991). Free as Air, which was set on the fictional Channel Island of Terhou,Based on Jethou. ran for 417 performances, some critics regarding it as more slick and professional than its predecessor.Independent obituary of Julian Slade, loc.cit. Rexton S. Bunnett, an avid collector of memorabilia of musical theatre, described Free as Air as "a true book musical" rather than (like Salad Days) "a flimsy, revue like show": sleeve notes to 2007 CD release of Free as Air (Sepia 1102). At the very least, Salad Days "didn't rely on any Broadway model of musical, seeming rather to represent a vigorous counter-attack on the form": The Musicals Collection – 18: Salad Days (Orbis, 1994). A cast recording, which includes Lewis singing a solo number, "Nothing But Sea and Sky", duets with John Trevor ("Free as Air" and "I'd Like to Be Like You") and in a trio with Josephine Tewson and Gerald Harper ("Holiday Island"), was released on compact disc in 2007.Sepia CD 1102 (2007) One admirer has written that her "sometimes uncertain soprano voice" was "tenuous but perched on the edge of beauty". Like Lewis, both Harper and Tewson moved successfully into television in the 1960s.Gerald Harper achieved fame as Adam Adamant and James Hadleigh. Josephine Tewson's best known role came in the 1990s as Hyacinth Bucket's neighbour Elizabeth in the situation comedy Keeping Up Appearances. Leonard Rossiter, remembered for his TV roles as Rupert Rigsby and Reginald Perrin, was also in the original production of Free as Air. In 1967 Lewis and Pauline Yates, who later played Rossiter's wife, Elizabeth Perrin, appeared together in an episode of Mr. Rose ("The Honest Villain"). Peter Beton also appeared in Free as Air.
Other roles In the early 1960s Lewis played extensively in repertory theatre in Bristol, appearing in, among many other productions, revivals of John Dighton's The Happiest Days of Your Life (1960) (based on his screenplay for the 1949 film starring Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford), Noël Coward's Private Lives (1960) and Blithe Spirit (1961) and Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (1960). In 1962 she played the flirtatious Natalia Snevellicci in the Bristol première of Step into the Limelight, a musical by Edgar K. Bruce and Betty Lawrence based on the Crummles theatrical troupe in Charles Dickens' novel Nicholas Nickleby. In 2004 a compact disc was released of "demo" recordings made at the time by members of the cast, with Lawrence on piano, together with ones cut in 1969 when the show was revived in Bristol with a new cast that included Josephine Gordon and Elric Cooper.
Lewis appeared also at other provincial theatres: for example, with Robert Beatty, Kynaston Reeves and Geoffrey Palmer in George Ross and Campbell Singer's Difference of Opinion at the Theatre Royal, Brighton in 1965.Theatre Royal programme, loc.cit., for production beginning on 25 January 1965. Lewis and Campbell Singer, who was a well-known actor on television, both appeared in an episode of Mr. Rose, "The Black Beast", in March 1967. She returned to the West End in 1963 for the London première of Leonard Bernstein's On the Town at the Prince of Wales Theatre. In a short run,The production opened on 30 May 1963 and ran for 63 performances. Lewis took the feisty role of Claire (the part played by Ann Miller in the 1949 film and on Broadway by the show's librettist Betty Comden) alongside two American actresses, Andrea Jaffe and Carol Arthur.Ethan Mordden, notes for 1993 Deutsche Grammophon CD 437 516-2.
Television in the mid-1960s In the mid '60s Gillian Lewis appeared in episodes of such popular television series as Gideon's Way (1964), The Avengers (1965), Mogul (1965), Public Eye (1965) and The Baron (1966). A number of her roles, then and later, were in series that subsequently acquired "cult" status among devotees such as Department S in which she appeared in the 1968 episode One of Our Aircraft is Empty.
In the Avengers episode, "The Man-Eater of Surrey Green" (broadcast December 1965), she played Laura Burford, an old friend of Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) who was mysteriously lured away from scientific work alongside her tactile fiancé to a horticultural project aimed at propagating menacing bean-like plants with gigantic tendrils. As Joyce Grant in The Baron ("So Dark the Night", broadcast 15 March 1967), her father died in a spooky country house just before the series' eponymous hero (Steve Forrest as John Mannering) and his glamorous assistant (Sue Lloyd as Cordelia Winfield) arrived to value some antiques. This was the prelude to "an eerie web of intrigue, murder and revenge, with two girls facing hair-raising danger".Notes to Network DVD, The Baron (2005), p. 13.
Mr. Rose (1967) In the influentialPhilip Purser in Leslie Halliwell's Television Companion (8th ed., 1984). Mr. Rose (Granada, 1967), starring William Mervyn as Charles Rose, an acerbic retired Scotland Yard detective,See, for example, Hallilwell, supra; notes to Mr. Rose: complete first series (Network DVD, 2012). Mervyn, who was probably best known for his role as the Bishop of St. Ogg's in All Gas and Gaiters, first appeared as Chief Inspector Rose in The Odd Man (1962). Lewis played his live-in secretary, Miss Drusilla Lamb. Drusilla was employed ostensibly to help Rose with his memoirs, although work on these was repeatedly delayed by his getting involved in unofficial investigative work.In his use of "influential" to describe Mr. Rose, Purser (Halliwell, supra) went so far as to draw a comparison with the American series Ironside, which began in 1967 with Raymond Burr as a former San Francisco police chief assisted by three young officers, including Barbara Anderson as the fashionable and well-heeled Eve Whitfield. A year earlier, in the BBC's Adam Adamant Lives!, Gerald Harper as Adamant had, like Rose, a young female assistant (Juliet Harmer as Georgina Jones) and a manservant (Jack May). Though set thirty or so years earlier, the most similar role on British television to that of Drusilla Lamb was probably that of Miss Lemon (Pauline Moran) in the adaptations of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels starring David Suchet (LWT/ITV, 1989–).
Lewis as Drusilla Lamb Over a series of 13 episodes produced and mostly written by Philip Mackie, Lewis portrayed Drusilla as a highly professional and, at first, rather prim, proper and somewhat icyIn the first episode, "The Bright Bomber", Donald Webster as John Halifax refers to Drusilla (to her face) as "frigid" (a word with overtones of sexual unresponsiveness), but quickly apologises and changes his description to "icy". assistant who had been through finishing school, had a shorthand speed of 150 words per minute,Episode, "The Noble Roman", broadcast 3 March 1967. but was unable (so she always said) to make decent coffee.Although Drusilla was required to cook infrequently, it transpired that she had achieved only "highly commended" for her domestic science at finishing school: episode, "The Honest Villain", 14 April 1967. However, despite her apparent hauteur, she was also beautiful,Sleeve notes, 2012 DVD (loc.cit.) attracting ready attention from men to whom Rose introduced her, and, in the first episode (broadcast 17 February 1967), her potential sexiness was hinted at by an unexpected scene in which Rose's manservant (Donald Webster as John Halifax) burst into her bedroom as she was about to put on a jumper over her bra and panties."The Bright Bomber", loc.cit. Halifax's intentions were perfectly honourable: Rose had just told him about Drusilla's proximity to a bomb explosion and he was concerned for her welfare. Despite Drusilla's momentary loss of composure, she appeared largely unfazed by this intrusion, as also by other early incidents, such as a bomb explosion at Rose's front door and (a few years before "women's lib" began to take hold) Rose's pinching her buttocks, apparently to demonstrate that he alone was capable of shocking her. Her generally worldly and practical outlook was further corroborated by her calm demeanour at a boisterous riverboat party that culminated in a provocative striptease by a blonde teenager (Judy Geeson) who had been hired to compromise Rose.Episode, "The Tin God", broadcast 31 March 1967. In the event, Rose outwitted his protagonists. Even so, Rose thought Drusilla bossyEpisode, "The One Woman", broadcast 5 May 1967. and "refused to be nagged" by her on Sunday afternoon.Episode, "The Good Loser", broadcast 12 May 1967. She could also be quite spirited, even blunt and wilful: she was angrily defiant when held prisoner after being kidnapped,Episode, "The Avenging Angel", 28 April 1967 while, during a minor domestic encounter, Rose seemed amused by her telling him to "damn well do" something himself because she thought she was being treated unreasonably.Episode, "The Honest Villain", broadcast 14 April 1967.