She kept the family element of the comedy running smoothly with her seemingly effortless and always unselfish professionalism. Yates is survived by their two daughters, Polly, a writer, and Jemma, an actor, and three grandchildren.ĭavid Nobbs writes: Few people singled out Pauline Yates for praise when The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin hit our screens and this in itself showed how perfectly she played the part of Reggie’s conventional suburban middle-class wife. Yates could sometimes be found in the kitchen pouring wine down the sink to encourage the guests to go.ĭonald died in 1991 from a heart attack on the set of the ITV sitcom El C.I.D. They loved to entertain, and the house was often full of actors, writers and directors sitting around a drinks-laden table gossiping and laughing. On stage she was Mrs Bennett in a Liverpool Playhouse production of Pride and Prejudice, and toured as Lettice in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage (1991).ĭomestic life in the Churchills’ Primrose Hill, north London, home could have been a sitcom script. Her last TV appearance was in the 2002 pilot for the ITV crime series Rose and Maloney, starring Sarah Lancashire and Phil Davis. Later, she was in four series of the Thames Television sitcom Keep It in the Family (1980-83) as the put-upon wife of a cartoonist, Dudley Rush (Robert Gillespie), and in 1985 appeared with Julie Walters in the film She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas as one of a group of middle-aged women at a survival school. In 1957 she was in the one of the first hospital soap operas, ITV’s Emergency Ward 10, and she appeared in the BBC police series Z Cars and Softly Softly, and, on a number of occasions, in ITV’s Armchair Theatre, for which Churchill wrote several plays. Yates’s looks and ability to learn lines quickly, a trick perfected during her years in rep, made her a popular choice for TV casting directors. She met the writer and actor Donald Churchill in 1960 and they were married later that year. In two weeks she had found work as an assistant stage manager at Chorley theatre, before moving on to rep companies throughout the north and in London, where she shared digs with the actor Peggy Mount. When she left Childwall Valley high school at 17, her mother gave her an ultimatum: get a job within a year or train as a teacher. Raised in Liverpool, Elizabeth was determined to be an actor, much against her parents’ wishes. She was born into a working-class household in St Helens, Lancashire (now in Merseyside), the eldest of three daughters of Thomas Yates, a commercial traveller, and Marjorie (nee Blackie), who ran a corner shop. She was a consummate comic foil, appearing in The Ronnie Barker Playhouse on ITV in 1968, but also taking on central rroles as the Tory MP in the BBC’s My Honourable Mrs (1975), opposite Derek Nimmo, and the divorcee finding a new life after marriage in Thames TV’s Harriet’s Back in Town (1972). Yates’s career path was almost like a route map through British TV comedy in the 70s and 80s.
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