Hattie

Product Description

The hardback of this first & authorised biography received very good reviews & immediately reprinted. It tells the story of one of the heroines of post-war British comedy on radio film & TV. Hattie Jacques is known as the billowing imposing Matron in the Carry On films as the star of such BBC radio classics as ITMA Educating Archie & Hancocks Half Hour & as the fictional sister of Eric Sykes in his long-running TV sitcom. But the formidable frumpy galleon-in-full-sail screen persona could not have been more at odds with the real-life woman as this biography reveals for the first time. She had a tempestuous wartime affair with an American officer & then a strange marriage to the actor John le Mesurier (Corporal Wilson in Dads Army) whose dissatisfactions she circumnavigated by moving her lover a flashy Cockney car dealer into the matrimonial home. But as well as being warm & sexy & generous she was also owing to her lifelong struggle with her weight needy & melancholic & rueful that her size persistently typecast her & excluded her from many roles. This biography has been written with full co-operation from Hatties son & show business friends like Barbara Windsor Clive Dunn Galton & Simpson & Ian Carmichael.