Maria Charles, who has died aged 93, was a character actor familiar to screen and stage audiences for more than 60 years. She was vivacious, slim, just 5ft tall and memorable for having what one critic described as “the expression of a startled mouse”.
Her earliest successes came in West End stage musicals. She originated the role of Dulcie, one of the finishing school students in Sandy Wilson’s 1920s musical pastiche The Boy Friend at Wyndham’s theatre, and she stayed with it for three years (1954-57).
Charles’s rendition of It’s Never Too Late to Fall in Love, a duet with John Rutland – playing the married flirt Lord Brockhurst – was a highlight of the show. She had to turn down an offer to reprise the part on Broadway because she was expecting her first baby.
Two decades later Charles took over the starring role of the wicked matron Miss Hannigan from Sheila Hancock in Annie (Victoria Palace theatre, 1978-79). Then she played Solange LaFitte in the original West End production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies (Shaftesbury theatre, 1987-89). In this story of a 30th-anniversary reunion of showgirls, starring Julia McKenzie and Diana Rigg, Charles performed one of her character’s old numbers, Ah! Paree, with suitable pseudo-Gallic sophistication.
By then she was a television veteran, with endless one-off parts, usually in dramas. She had her first regular role in the first series of Secret Army (1977), playing Louise Colbert, who suspects her bank manager husband and niece of involvement with the Belgian resistance but dares not broach the subject.
Sitcom arrived when Charles appeared in all three series of Agony (1979-81). As Bea Fisher, the overbearing mother of Maureen Lipman’s agony aunt, Jane Lucas, her character interferes in all aspects of her daughter’s life. She reprised the part in the 1995 sequel, Agony Again.
The rival antiques dealers sitcom Never the Twain gave Charles another regular part, between 1982 and 1988, as Mrs Sadler, Windsor Davies’s cack-handed cleaner who breaks things.
Her career seemed to go on for ever and, approaching 80, she was back in the West End to play the “dotty OAP lifer” Noreen Biggs in the gritty, witty Bad Girls – the Musical at the Garrick theatre in 2007. It was a part she had taken on TV for several Bad Girls episodes in 2002 and 2003.
Charles was born in London to Jewish parents, Celia (nee Ashkenaza) and David Schneider, a ladies’ hairdresser known as “Mr Charles”, from where she took her professional name.
She wanted to be an actor from childhood, dressing up and performing sketches with her friends. But on leaving school in Ealing at 14 she was apprenticed to a London beauty parlour and had jobs in five different hairdressers’ salons over eight months, which ended when she sprayed shampoo down a difficult customer’s neck.
Her reluctant parents succumbed to her ambitions and she trained at Rada (1944-46), lying about her age to get in, and won its bronze medal. Before leaving, she began a run in a play that transferred from the New Lindsey theatre, Notting Hill, to the West End. She took the supporting role of Ruby Lockwood, described as a “glamour puss”, in Elsa Shelley’s groundbreaking juvenile delinquency drama Pick-Up Girl (Prince of Wales theatre, 1946), starring Patricia Plunkett as Elizabeth Collins.
Five years later she took the lead role of the wayward teenager herself during a spell at Buxton repertory theatre (1950-51) in Derbyshire, although she was Ruby again in a 1957 television adaptation. Charles also displayed her talent for comedy in a 1947 tour of Out of the Frying Pan, as well as appearing in stage revues.
She was back in the West End to play Rosie, a young unmarried mother, in another boundary-pushing play, Women of Twilight (Vaudeville and Victoria Palace theatres, 1951-52), before musical roles beckoned. They included Yente, the matchmaker, in a revival of Fiddler on the Roof, alongside Topol, at the Apollo Victoria theatre in 1983.
Between 1989 and 1994 she also displayed her dramatic prowess with the National Theatre company, playing wide-ranging parts in The Good Person of Sichuan, The Wind in the Willows and The Absence of War, part of the David Hare trilogy.
A long-time member of the company at the London’s Players’ theatre – where she opened in The Boy Friend before its move to the West End – she took the music-hall style to television in The Good Old Days for 20 years (1953-73). In 1990 she directed a one-night revival of The Boy Friend at the Duchess theatre in aid of the Players’.
Charles often played Jewish characters on television, where her dozens of parts included Rita, the mother, in Jack Rosenthal’s play Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976); the prime minister’s mother in Disraeli (1978, Disraeli: Portrait of a Romantic in the US); and Madge Fellows in early episodes of Thomas and Sarah (1979), keeping house for the couple in a reversal of their previous roles in Upstairs Downstairs.
She also appeared in episodes of Coronation Street in 2005 as Lena Thistlewood, who took a fancy to Ken Barlow and wangled a free MoT certificate and haircut after walking in on Tyrone Dobbs and Maria Connor having sex, as well as leaving her dog, renamed Eccles, to Blanche Hunt in her will.
Daniel Craig was acting at the National Youth Theatre when Charles, his neighbour, tutored him for a drama school audition that set him on the road to fame.
In 1952 she married the actor Robin Hunter after working with him at Buxton rep. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966. She is survived by two daughters from that marriage, Kelly, an actor, and Samantha, a production stage manager, and two grandchildren, Albert and Charlie.
• Maria Charles (Maria Zena Schneider), actor, born 22 September 1929; died 21 April 2023
