Stephanie Cole, the actress, who has died aged 84, spent two decades treading the boards in provincial theatre before landing her breakthrough role in the BBC’s wartime drama Tenko; she subsequently became one of British television comedy’s favourite battleaxes.
Tenko (1981-84) was set in 1942, shortly after the fall of Singapore, when women trying to escape by sea were captured and interned in makeshift camps. Stephanie Cole was Dr Beatrice Mason – like many of the characters she played, not one to suffer fools gladly – in a series noted for its realism in depicting the dirty conditions endured by British, Dutch and Australian women from widely differing backgrounds.
Beatrice’s fellow internees included the colonel’s wife and reluctant leader of the British, Marion Jefferson (played by Ann Bell), the spoilt socialite Rose Millar (Stephanie Beacham), the mouthy cockney Blanche Simmons (Louise Jameson), the veteran suffragette Joss Holbrook (Jean Anderson) and the Dutch contingent’s authoritarian leader Sister Ulrica (Patricia Lawrence). Burt Kwouk was the Japanese camp commander Major Yamauchi. The only make-up worn by the women represented boils, bruises, cuts, bites and dirt as they faced overcrowding, malnutrition, violence, disease and death.
By the time Stephanie Cole returned for the 1985 special Tenko Reunion, set five years after the PoWs’ release, she had unleashed her talent for comedy. In the final two series of Roy Clarke’s Open All Hours (1982 and 1985), she played Delphine Featherstone, a paranoid, morose customer clad in a black hat and long cloak who sets her sights on the stuttering Yorkshire shopkeeper Arkwright (Ronnie Barker) – unaware that he and Granville (David Jason), his nephew and assistant, call her the “Black Widow”.
She later returned for Clarke’s sequel Still Open All Hours (2013-19), with Mrs Featherstone switching her attentions to Granville after he inherits the shop following Arkwright’s death.
Second from left with the cast of Tenko in Singapore, 1984 – PA
The actress had still not turned 50 when she progressed to top of the cast list in the sitcom Waiting for God (1990-94) as Diana Trent, the down-to-earth, waspish retired photojournalist at Bayview Retirement Home. She was seen goading the lethargic residents into sharing her subversive outlook on life and found an ally in the widowed accountant Tom Ballard (Graham Crowden), eventually moving into his room.
In a 2019 Telegraph interview, the forthright star recalled asking the programme’s producer-director, Gareth Gwenlan: “Why did you cast a man of the right age but a woman 20 years younger?”
His reply astonished her. “This was in the early 1990s,” she explained, “and I promise you he said, ‘Because no woman would have the energy at that age to do what we’re asking you to do.’ I was appalled.”
Another starring role for Stephanie Cole, again playing beyond her years, was as the scatty Peggy Beare, being cared for by one of her sons, in Keeping Mum (1997-98). The sitcom, which also featured Meera Syal as her daughter-in-law, received lukewarm reviews but ran to two series.
Then, in Life As We Know It (2001), she and Richard Wilson played Lizzie and Alex Cameron, an ageing couple trying to remain active while coping with the challenges posed by their three difficult grown-up children.
With David Jason in Still Open All Hours – BBC Studios/Gary Moyes
In the first four series (2004-09) of Doc Martin, Stephanie Cole brought conviction to the role of Joan Norton, the motherly aunt of Martin Clunes’s surgeon-turned-GP, Martin Ellingham.
Another cherished TV part had the actress combining drama, comedy and pathos in Coronation Street to play Sylvia Goodwin, the cantankerous, bossy mother of Roy Cropper (David Neilson), from 2011 to 2013. Apart from mending a few bridges with Roy, the only human side of Sylvia to emerge was her brief romance with Milton Fanshaw, a wealthy American played by the former Man from U.N.C.L.E. star Robert Vaughn.
The actress was born Patricia Stephanie Cole in Solihull, Warwickshire, on October 5 1941. Her mother June, née Sheldon, was married to Leslie Cole, who left her several months before Stephanie’s birth. Only in her mid-teens did her mother tell her that she had been having an affair with someone else, who was Stephanie’s father. She searched for him later in life, only to learn that he had died seven months earlier.
When she was five, Stephanie moved with her mother and great-aunt Peg to Croyde, in Devon, where she was sent to boarding school. Her mother married her second husband, Colin Lees, two years later.
After they moved to Bitton, Gloucestershire, Stephanie Cole became a rebellious boarder at Clifton High School for Girls. Aged 15, she was expelled for throwing a Latin dictionary at a teacher who mocked her aspirations to act.
She learnt secretarial skills at the College of Commerce in Bristol before spending two years training at the city’s Old Vic Theatre School. She made her stage debut in 1960 as a 90-year-old woman in The Woodcarver, a play with the main company, alongside Leonard Rossiter. She then joined the company as an assistant stage manager and actor.
After receiving her OBE from Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, 2005 – Fiona Hanson/PA/WPA Rota
In a 1998 Radio Times interview, she admitted to being “quite promiscuous” while there, adding: “Without a father, you don’t know how to relate to men and think the way to do it is through sex.”
Stephanie Cole moved on to other rep companies, including long stints at Salisbury Playhouse between 1964 and 1970.
Feeling her career was going nowhere, she gave up acting in 1972, a year before her marriage to Henry Marshall, a playwright and fight director. She learnt to play the guitar and speak Welsh, and worked as a bookbinder.
“There was an element of nervous breakdown,” she said, “but it took place over such a long period it was more of a huge crisis of confidence.”
Stephanie Cole resumed her theatrical career within a few years, although her marriage ended in divorce in 1986. She also underwent therapy during this time.
On stage, she was particularly thrilled to appear in the West End as the tight-lipped headteacher Smale, alongside Glenda Jackson‘s title character, in Andrew Davies’s comedy Rose at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1980. Another highlight of her stage career was starring as Betty in A Passionate Woman, Kay Mellor‘s semi-autobiographical drama about her mother’s secret affair (Comedy Theatre, 1994-95). Stephanie Cole titled her 1998 autobiography A Passionate Life.
She began making an impact on television with small roles such as a solicitor, Mrs Bulstrode, in Emmerdale Farm in 1978, then played Mrs Major Gibbs, mother of two children growing up in the Salvation Army, in the Sunday-teatime serial Sally Ann (1979), written by Phil Redmond, and, after Tenko, Sarah Mincing in the children’s Lilliputian fantasy The Return of the Antelope (1986-88).
One of her early sitcom supporting roles, in A Bit of a Do (1989), written by David Nobbs and starring David Jason and Gwen Taylor, was as Betty Sillitoe, half of a wealthy couple taking it in turns to get drunk at family events.
Her later sitcom parts included Nesta, potty-mouthed aunt of Greg Davies’s hapless drama teacher, in Man Down (2014-17), and Marion, mother of Catherine Tyldesley’s karaoke-loving character, in Scarborough (2019).
Other dramatic roles included Muriel Carpenter in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologue Soldiering On (1988), the ancient, ill-fated Dame Lettie Colston in Muriel Spark‘s Memento Mori (1992), and the po-faced Aunt Ann Walker in Gentleman Jack (2019-22).
As Aunt Ann in Gentleman Jack in 2022 – Aimee Spinks/BBC/Lookout Point/HBO
On the radio she played Ariadne Oliver to John Moffatt‘s Hercule Poirot and featured in two of the finest Radio 4 comedies of the new millennium: as Olive, the sweetly scathing pensioner in Ed Reardon’s Week (2005-2021), and the acid-tongued airline owner Carolyn Knapp-Shappey opposite Roger Allam, Benedict Cumberbatch and Anthony Head in John Finnemore’s Cabin Pressure (2008-14).
Stephanie Cole was appointed OBE in 2005.
Her second husband, the actor Peter Birrel, whom she married in 1998, died of cancer in 2004. She is survived by Emma, the daughter of her first marriage.
Stephanie Cole, born October 5 1941, died September 18 2026
