Felicity Kendal: ‘The Good Life was an incredibly lucky break that did me no end of good’

msn.com:

influential and endlessly repeated 1970s comedy classic The Good Life. Yet she admits of the part that made her name: “There was a time when, if things had been different, Barbara would have been a bit of a curse – because for 10 years afterwards, I was always being offered similar light ­comedy things.

But as I’ve got older, I’ve done so much theatre – from Ayckbourn to Beckett – that The Good Life has now become a lovely memory for me.

And it was an incredibly lucky break that did me no end of good, by making me a recognisable actress. ”Having been set to work full-time at the age of 12 in her parents’ travelling theatre company in India, the actress became a stage addict for life.

And for the first time since the recovery of her partner, the theatre director Michael Rudman, now 83, from a life-­threatening six months of Covid between September 2020 and March 2021 – as well as from breaking his back in a shocking fall afterwards, only revealed here now – she finally feels able to return to her nomadic roots on a short 40th-anniversary tour of Michael Frayn’s famous farce Noises Off.