Sheila Bernette, who has died aged 94, had a long acting and singing career that began when she was a child. It embraced the West End, provincial theatre and summer seasons, as well as television, on which she appeared in light entertainment shows as a foil to comedy stars such as Leslie Crowther, Tommy Cooper, Dick Emery and Morecambe and Wise.
With a love of variety, she also kept returning to the Players’ theatre club, London, to perform Victorian music-hall entertainment over five decades. Standing at just 5ft tall, she was quickly recognised for her vivacious personality and became one of a small band of the Players’ company chosen to showcase their repertoire at the Strollers theatre club in New York (1961-62), enchanting US audiences with a touch of old England.
One critic, who remarked that “the ladies on stage are winking not infrequently” in the “gay and saucy show”, wrote: “Sheila Bernette’s timing is faultless. She sings Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow, which, Mr Stone [the “chairman” – master of ceremonies] tells us, has been whistled by duchesses and butcher boys.”
Another of her early successes, in 1957, was taking over the part of Dulcie in the Players’ West End production of The Boy Friend, Sandy Wilson’s pastiche on 1920s musicals, which ran at Wyndham’s theatre until 1959. She had previously played a smaller role in it after joining the Players in 1955.
On and off for 15 years (1968-83), Bernette, along with Players’ theatre performers and others, took the same brand of music-hall nostalgia to The Good Old Days, the BBC television show presented by Leonard Sachs at the City Varieties theatre in Leeds.
Although she had straight acting parts on television from the mid-50s, it was another 10 years before Bernette made her screen breakthrough performing comedy. Crowther was a champion of her talents and she displayed her all-round skills alongside him in his sketch show Crowther Takes a Look… (1965), The Black and White Minstrel Show (from 1967 to 1969), which he hosted, The Saturday Crowd (1969), Crowther’s Back in Town (1970) and The Leslie Crowther Show (1971).
She also joined him in summer seasons and the 1970 Royal Variety Performance, when Crowther introduced her as Natalia Nokemova, a Russian defector ballerina partnering his ballet dancer-cricketer Freddie Trumanov for the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, from the Nutcracker.
Bernette is also remembered for appearing as one of the pranksters playing tricks on the public in a 1974 revival of Candid Camera. A sequence titled Sheila’s Broom featured her as an elderly woman sweeping a pavement and whacking men on the backside with her brush. “That was such a successful character that I went over to New York to do it for [the US version of] Candid Camera,” she said.
Born in London, Bernette was the daughter of Freda (nee Morris) and Charles Poncini, a restaurant waiter of Italian descent. She trained in ballet at the Italia Conti Stage Academy from the age of two, leaving after five years to concentrate on acting, and attended the Aida Foster theatre school.
She performed in a London Palladium pantomime at the age of 12, and three years later began treading the boards with rep companies and in touring shows. Her West End debut came in the revue-style musical Over the Moon (Piccadilly theatre, 1953).
One of her early dramatic roles on screen was in the 1960 film version of Sons and Lovers, playing Polly, a workmate of the passion-seeking miner’s son Paul Morel (Dean Stockwell). She switched to sitcom with guest roles in Hancock (in 1963), as a canteen worker alongside Tony Hancock; Hugh and I (from 1963 to 1966), with Hugh Lloyd and Terry Scott; Beggar My Neighbour (in 1967), with Reg Varney; Ooh La La! (in 1968), with Patrick Cargill; The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (in 1977), with Leonard Rossiter; Butterflies (in 1979), with Wendy Craig; and Agony Again (in 1995), with Maureen Lipman.
In light entertainment she appeared with some of the biggest stars of the day: Morecambe and Wise in Two of a Kind and The Morecambe & Wise Show (both in 1968); Emery in The Dick Emery Show (in 1972 and 1973); Jimmy Tarbuck in Tarbuck’s Luck (in 1972); Larry Grayson in Shut That Door! (in 1973); Cooper in Cooper – Just Like That! (in 1978); Ted Rogers in 3-2-1 (in 1979); and Syd Little and Eddie Large in The Little and Large Show (in 1990). On BBC radio she was a regular on The Roy Hudd Show (1969).
Briefly switching to TV soap in 1973, Bernette was in six episodes of Coronation Street as Sister Delaney, a hospital nurse tending to Elsie Tanner (Pat Phoenix), who had been knocked down by a taxi. Her last role on television was in the children’s sitcom Hotel Trubble (2008-11) as Mrs Poshington, a demanding long-term guest who becomes the establishment’s cleaner after losing her fortune. A new generation of viewers saw her as a character with a library of tall stories, a stuffed cat she believes to be real and the revelation that she had eight husbands who all died in mysterious circumstances.
Bernette’s final film part came as a pickpocket and shoplifter among a group of Athens tourists in the romcom My Life in Ruins (2009, released as Driving Aphrodite in the UK).
On stage she was a regular in the Players’ theatre’s annual pantomimes, including as the title character in Puss in Boots in 1991. She made her final appearances with the company on tour in 1994 and 1995.
• Sheila Bernette (Sheila Mary Poncini), actor and singer, born 30 March 1931; died 12 January 2026
