Gudrun Ure, who has died aged 98, was 59 – and playing older than her years – when she landed the television role that finally made her famous after 40 years as an actor. She starred in the 1980s ITV children’s series Super Gran, as the happy, gentle elderly woman who finds, after a magic-ray machine is fired at her during a stroll in the park, that she has new special powers to help her defend residents of the fictional town of Chiselton from villains.
It is the villain-in-chief, Scunner Campbell (played by Iain Cuthbertson), who accidentally fires the contraption after stealing it from Inventor Black (Bill Shine). This turns Granny Smith into “Super Gran” and, assisted by very basic special effects, Ure was seen jumping high or pole-vaulting through windows (using a trampoline and trick camera angles), flying (with the help of a crane) and riding through the air on a two-wheel, multiwinged Flycycle (in reality an adapted butcher’s boy’s bike). Ure did many of the stunts herself, while some – including Super Gran cartwheeling – were performed by a double.
Stars queued up to appear alongside Ure as Super Gran, who wore a tam o’shanter bonnet and tartan outfit. There were appearances by Spike Milligan, Bernard Cribbins, Barbara Windsor, Lulu and George Best. Billy Connolly sang and co-wrote the theme song, which compared Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone and various superheroes unfavourably with Ure’s character, while Cuthbertson interjected: “Is there nothing that she cannae do?”
Super Gran, based on children’s books by Forrest Wilson, ran for two 13-part series and a Christmas special (1985-87), was sold around the world and won a 1985 International Emmy in the children and young people category. Slightly bemused by the sudden fame, Ure said: “People have started dressing up for fancy-dress parties as Super Gran. When I see them, it makes me feel a bit strange.”
The daughter of Allan Ure, a draughtsman who owned an iron foundry, and his wife, Lily, Gudrun was born in Milton of Campsie, Stirlingshire (now East Dunbartonshire), and brought up in the Hyndland district of Glasgow, where she attended Laurel Bank school for girls. In her teens, she performed in Children’s Hour BBC radio productions from Scotland. “I was so small I used to have to stand on a dumpy – what used to be called a pouffe – to reach the microphone,” she recalled.
On leaving school, she worked as a teacher and toured with Bertha Waddell’s children’s theatre. Turning professional, she acted with repertory companies at the Citizens theatre, Glasgow, and Perth theatre. When the Glasgow company performed at the Gateway, Edinburgh, one critic declared of her performance in the title role of Lady Precious Stream that she “gave to her part the delicacy and charm which kept the play flowing smoothly”. Indeed, “charming” was a description often attributed to her on stage.
Ure’s theatrical highlight came in 1951 when she played Desdemona in Othello, with Orson Welles both starring and directing, at the St James’s theatre in the West End of London. The Sketch praised her “Desdemona of intelligence, no mere butter-muslin shadow”, but Ure later described Welles as a “monster” and “frightening”. She said he drank a bottle of brandy a day and champagne during intervals, adding: “When he came on stage, he would click his fingers at you and talk at you.”
The 12-week production was staged to help Welles raise funds to finish that year’s film version, The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice. For the 1955 American release, Ure dubbed the voice of Suzanne Cloutier in the role of Desdemona.
Welles also persuaded her that she should change her professional name to Ann Gudrun, which she did, but Ure reverted to her real name at the start of the next decade.
She frequently acted in radio productions, including The Snow Goose (1954) alongside Laurence Olivier, and on television, in roles such as Jean Wills in the first run of the children’s adventure series Garry Halliday (1959) and Mrs Copperfield in both Young David (1959) and Tales from Dickens (1960).
There were also film roles alongside Gregory Peck in The Million Pound Note and as Donald Sinden’s girlfriend in Doctor in the House (both 1954).
Her chance to play another Shakespearean part, Lady Macbeth, came in 1964 with the Encyclopedia Britannica educational film series Macbeth.
Ure’s later television roles included a widow with healing hands in the feature-length comedy-drama Life After Life (1990), set in a retirement home and starring George Cole, the matriarch Margot McHoan in The Crow Road (1996) and one-off characters in Midsomer Murders (in 2000) and Where the Heart Is (in 2001). Her last screen role was in Casualty in 2009.
In 1964, Ure married John Ramsay; he died in 2008. She is survived by her stepson, Gordon.
• Gudrun Henderson Ure, actor, born 12 March 1926; died 14 May 2024
