Joan Rhodes
Joan Rhodes left home at fourteen. Her parents had deserted her and her siblings, there had been the workhouse and then an unhappy stretch with an aunt, and after that came rough nights in Brewer Street in Soho. She joined a travelling fair, watched a professional strongman work a crowd, and took the idea for herself. The act made her name: a British strongwoman who also worked as a wrestler and a stuntwoman.
Screen work came later and stayed occasional, which is what usually happens to variety performers. Television used her for size and presence. She is Cartimandua in the historical anthology Churchill's People, Big Nell in the highwayman series Dick Turpin, a gypsy lady in the sitcom Duty Free. In film she turns up as Daphne in The Pink Panther Strikes Again and as the cook in David Lynch's The Elephant Man.
That last credit is the one worth pausing on. A Victorian story about the trade in staring at other people's bodies, with one of its bit players a woman who had actually made her living on a fairground stage.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Joan Rhodes
Her best known appearance is also the smallest: the cook in The Elephant Man, a couple of moments inside a film about the Victorian sideshow business, played by a woman who had earned a living on the variety circuit. Watch it with that in mind and the casting stops looking incidental.
The Pink Panther Strikes Again is the broadest and easiest entry, a Peter Sellers farce where she is Daphne. For the television, Dick Turpin is the most fun, an ITV adventure series with obvious use for a performer billed as Big Nell, and Churchill's People is the most curious, a BBC history anthology that cast her as the Brigantian queen Cartimandua. Duty Free is a mid-1980s sitcom and a footnote.
None of this is where her real audience found her. That was live, and it is not on a streaming service.