At 100, Thelma Ruby has acted on stage and screen for 80 years. Maureen Lipman first saw her as Prince Charming in 1953
‘I’ve got ten grandchildren, never having had a baby, 52 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.’
So says the fabulous actress, cabaret ‘star and Oldie of the Year winner Thelma Ruby – formerly Thelma Widgoer of Leeds, and Thelma Frye after her marriage at to the late director and educator Peter Frye.
She turns 100 on 23rd March. But, still, she recently had to learn a scene and audition five times, in person, for the Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu for a part in a new Tom Cruise film.
‘Don’t think I got it after all that,’ she laughs.
I first saw Thelma in pantomime in Hull in 1953 as Prince Charming (right), when I was seven. My mother must have told me she was Jewish, like us, and I clocked that there might be a chance for me to glitter as she did, on a stage. I may have doubted her veracity as a proper prince, what with the high heels, tights and rouged cheeks. Seventy-two years later, fresh from playing the Enchanted Teapot in Beauty and the Beast, I understand that authenticity of gender is the last thing that matters in pantoland.
Valerie Grove, The Oldie’s radio critic, led me to Thelma’s one-woman show at the King’s Head, Islington. At 96, she had the personality of an ingénue and the memory of a pachyderm. She sang, danced and told dazzling stories of working on Chimes at Midnight (1965) with Orson Welles and Cabaret on stage with Judi Dench.
She had played Golde to Topol’s Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof three times from 1984 and – he was rumoured to be tricky – she got on with him famously. As she later did with Stephen Berkoff in Kvetch. And the entire cast of Coronation Street welcomed her when she played Lily Dempsey in 1996.
When I asked her about Topol, she said her husband, Peter, had given him his first job and that he had behaved impeccably towards her. ‘You never lost your temper with him?’ I asked.
Her reply speaks volumes: ‘I’ve never lost my temper with anybody.’
It shows – in her unlined face, her bouncy grey curls, her colourful wardrobe and her exuberant love of life.
Her energy is tangible and she might flash her Cyd-Charisse-eat-your-heart- out legs at the drop of an anecdote.
‘The rest of me may have fallen into disrepair,’ she says, ‘but the legs are still spectacular.’
Her memory for names and detail is exceptional. She astounded me by remembering, 70 years on, the name of the dance-school teacher in Hull, Miss Pickles – I remember her, too – who supplied the kids for that panto.
She is a tour de force all right and one who actually relished being forced to tour. She crossed America four times with the version of Golda Meir she and Peter adapted from the play Golda, cutting the cast down from 31 to two.
Peter and she were friends for many years when both were with different partners. They married when Thelma was 45 and she gave up what was a very successful career in TV, film and stage in Britain to go and live with him in Israel, learning the language and making educational English-language films which are still shown.
Her mother, Paula, had been one of C B Cochran’s glamorous singers in the 1920s. Paula Ruby was her stage name. Thelma and Paula were evacuated to New York during the war and a US businessman, Henry Barnet, a friend of friends in Leeds, funded their four years there, refusing to take back a penny. His war effort, I guess.
She was a shy child – so her family were surprised when she went to an American college to study drama. She returned to England in 1944, joined ENSA and went on to have non-stop employment.
The day I spoke to her she had gleefully taken receipt of £21 residual for a TV series, Move On, with Jack Dee. We commiserated on the lack of actors’ residuals, now that all jobs come with a buy-out. I wish Equity would engage in actors rather than politics.
Thelma’s activism is alive and well as she campaigns vigorously to save neighbouring Wimbledon Park from being desecrated by the building of
38 new tennis courts on landscape gardens created by Capability Brown. The plans involve chopping down 300 trees.
‘If necessary’, she told the press, ‘I shall chain myself to a tree!’
One wall of her living-room window is filled with the most spectacular view. The flat resembles a set for a Merchant Ivory film. Her archive and memorabilia are, like her legs, quite spectacular.
Since an Oldie lunch brought us together, Thelma has travelled from Wimbledon to NW3 several times to have dinner with my partner and me – I had written ‘and I’ there, but she corrected my grammar. Pardon the unpardonable name-dropping but, in the company of some big hitters such as Howard Jacobson and a couple of Labour peers, Thelma took the floor. She also took the ceiling and walls and held the room in the palm of her manicured hands.
The 100th-birthday party’s at our place. I’m proposing the toast.
Nobody’s value is more precious than Ruby’s.
Maureen Lipman is in Coronation Street
