Vivian Pickles

English character actress Vivian Kay Pickles is one of three siblings born in London and educated at Le Collège Feminin de Bouffément in Paris, a women's college set up in 1924. Her uncle was Wilfred Pickles, a veteran actor and radio broadcaster. Vivian began her acting career aged fourteen, playing the lead in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1946) in an early BBC television production. She completed her training as a dancer at the Aida Foster Drama School and graduated from there to repertory theatre and to West End revues, alternating with appearances on the screen. During the fifties and early sixties, she was much acclaimed for her performances in the new wave of 'kitchen sink' realism plays by authors like John Osborne and Willis Hall. On screen, Vivian made her breakthrough in the title role of Ken Russell's biopic Isadora (1966), winning the award for Best Actress at the 1967 Monte Carlo International TV Festival. She followed this with two back-to-back successes: as the bohemian academic Alva Hodson in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and as Harold Chasen's controlling, unsentimental socialite mother in Hal Ashby's black comedy Harold and Maude (1971). New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby commented "Because Vivian Pickles is an actress who is particularly gifted at exaggerating understatements, many of Mrs. Chasen's reactions to Harold's bleak pranks are as funny as they are meant to be". Vivian was also cast in two of Lindsay Anderson's films, O Lucky Man! (1973) and (as Matron) in the chaotic satire Britannia Hospital (1982). For TV, Vivian has often played pivotal supporting roles in literary adaptations or period drama: Catherine Linton in Wuthering Heights (1948), Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (1967), Mary Stuart in Elizabeth R (1971), Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), Maxim de Winter's loquacious sister Beatrice in Rebecca (1979), Martha Yellan in Jamaica Inn (1983), Mrs. Shipley in The Lives of Benjamin Franklin (1974) and the formidable Aunt Dahlia in Jeeves and Wooster (1990). She has also provided her voice for BBC radio dramatisations as P.G. Wodehouse's Aunt Dahlia and girls' school headmistress Dame Daphne Winkworth (1989), as well as Mrs. Cratchit in the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol (1990). She has multiple television credits as storyteller of the children's program Jackanory (1965) between 1969 and 1978, in addition to a recurring part in the 'Uncle Jack' kid's show of the early 90s as eccentric scientist Cynthia Birdwood. Vivian retired from acting in 1999, following a guest appearance as a retired school teacher in an episode of Midsomer Murders (1997).