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Stephanie Cole, who has died aged 84, was a skilful actor with a powerful voice. She was also an exemplar of the strong, no-nonsense characters that she played with layers of vulnerability, humour and kindness.
She made her television debut in a 1968 episode of Z Cars and maintained a solid screen career before coming to prominence as a leading member of a strong female ensemble in the BBC series Tenko (1981-84, and Tenko Reunion, 1985), as the stoic Dr Beatrice Mason, doing her best to maintain the health of her fellow internees in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war.
Convincingly realised and well-drawn, Tenko offered three-dimensional characters and tackled morally complex storylines – regularly achieving more than 14 million viewers.
Thereafter she was rarely off our screens, particularly popular as irascible senior citizens in TV comedy, despite being 48 when cast as the most enduring of these – the acerbic Diana Trent in the retirement home sitcom Waiting for God (1990-94). The role won her a 1992 British Comedy award for best TV comedy actress.
She was born in Solihull, Warwickshire, the daughter of June (nee Sheldon), an art student, and, Stephanie believed, Leslie Cole, an RAF airman, wartime lovers who split before she was born. She later learned that she was in fact the progeny of an affair between June and a man called Charles Wilson, whom she encountered only briefly in adult life (although she became close to her half-sister, his daughter).
Stephanie soon moved with her mother and great-aunt Peg to Croyde, north Devon, and she was sent as a weekly boarder to a local school aged five, where she fell in love with literature, poetry and theatre: she discovered that she had a gift for different voices and accents.
When June remarried, Stephanie moved with her to Bitton, Gloucestershire, but she did not enjoy her time at Clifton high school for girls, in Bristol and, after throwing a Latin book at a teacher who had scoffed at her acting aspirations, she was told she would not be welcome back after completing her O-levels.
She subsequently got a secretarial qualification from the College of Commerce in Bristol before enrolling at the Bristol Old Vic drama school: among her first roles there – aged 17 – was Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit, an early indication of her tendency to be cast older than she was (she later played the role professionally at the Savoy theatre at the more sensible age of 63).
Upon graduation she joined the Old Vic as an acting assistant stage manager before repertory theatre beckoned in Lincoln, Canterbury, Hornchurch and Salisbury (where, among many roles in her six-year tenure, she played the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).
Continually told that her career would take off when she was older, and beset with depression, she quit the profession in 1972 and worked briefly as a bookbinder and drama teacher before being invited to star in Tina at the Orange Tree theatre, Richmond (1975). She appeared in Noises Off (Savoy theatre, 1982) Steel Magnolias (Lyric theatre, 1989), Kay Mellor’s A Passionate Woman, directed by Ned Sherrin (Comedy theatre, 1994), The Shell Seekers (national tour 2003) and Mrs Higgins in Pygmalion (Chichester, 2010).
It was TV, though, that made her a household name. Concurrent with Tenko she showed her aptitude for comedy in Roy Clarke’s Open All Hours (1982, 1985) as the gloomy “Black Widow” Delphine Featherstone, reprising the role in the 2013-19 revival Still Open All Hours. She was good value in David Nobbs’s social function comedy A Bit of a Do (1989) as the gossipy, and often inebriated, Betty. She was an addled matriarch in Keeping Mum (1997-98), and a potty-mouthed aunt opposite Greg Davies in Man Down (2014-17).
In 2011 she joined Coronation Street as Sylvia Goodwin, crotchety mother of the amiable Roy Cropper (David Neilson). Continuing that programme’s fine tradition of amusing and formidable northern women, Sylvia garnered Cole a British Soap award for best comedy performance in 2012.
Her other notable television roles included Muriel, a widow with a can-do attitude, in Soldiering On, one of Alan Bennett’s acclaimed Talking Heads monologues (1988), Dame Lettie Colston in the BBC’s excellent adaptation of Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1992) and Martin Clunes’s aunt Joan in ITV’s popular series Doc Martin (2004-09). Her apparent on-air suicide in the groundbreaking, meta and live Inside No 9 episode Dead Line (2018) was unforgettable event television, and more recently she was in Gentleman Jack (2019-22).
She also made her mark on radio, featuring in two BBC Radio 4 comedies: from 2005 to 2021 she played the ostensibly sweet but trouble-making Olive, a creative writing student of Christopher Douglas’s misanthropic writer in Ed Reardon’s Week, and was Carolyn Knapp-Shappey, former owner of the world’s smallest airline – crewed by Roger Allam and Benedict Cumberbatch – in John Finnemore’s much-loved Cabin Pressure (2008-14).
Her autobiography, A Passionate Life, was published in 1998 and she was appointed OBE in 2005.
Her 1973 marriage to the writer and stage combat teacher Henry Marshall ended in 1988, and in 1998 she married the actor Peter Birrell after meeting him at a reunion event decades after they had last seen each other as colleagues at Bristol. Peter died in 2004 and she is survived by her daughter, Emma, from her first marriage.
