Lynda Baron
Lynda Baron is an actor, born 1939.
Lynda Baron was born Lilian Ridgway and worked on screen for more than fifty years, but for British audiences she is one part: Nurse Gladys Emmanuel, the object of Arkwright's hopeless pursuit in Open All Hours from 1976 to 1985, and again in its sequel, Still Open All Hours. Playing the woman who is always saying no is a thankless job in a sitcom, and Baron made it the opposite by refusing to play irritation. Her Gladys was fond of him. That is the whole trick, and it is why the show worked.
She was a singer as well as an actress, and there is a theatrical largeness to her comic work that came out of that: Ambrosia in Up Pompeii!, Auntie Pat in The Upper Hand, Norma Patterson in Fat Friends. A generation of British children knew her instead as Auntie Mabel in the children's series Come Outside, and she had a long soap run in EastEnders as Linda Clarke.
The film credits are a good scattering of other people's projects: Louise the waitress in Hot Millions in 1968, Peshe in Barbra Streisand's Yentl, Mrs Vitali in Colour Me Kubrick, a madam in Rome, small parts in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and Dream Horse. She died in 2022.
Movies (5)
TV (7)
Where to start with Lynda Baron
Open All Hours is the reason to be here, and the episodes are short enough to watch several in a sitting. Baron is the straight woman in a show built entirely on Ronnie Barker's stammer, and the pleasure is in watching her decide, week by week, how much of it she is going to tolerate. Still Open All Hours is the late revival, softer and slower, and worth it mostly for her.
Elsewhere she turns up in strange company. Yentl is the prestige credit; Rome is the most incongruous, a Manchester sitcom voice in a Roman brothel; Colour Me Kubrick is the oddity, a small British film about an impostor. Up Pompeii! shows the broader, bawdier register she came up in, and Hot Millions is the earliest film credit here.