Pat Coombs
She had a specialty, and it had a name. Pat Coombs played the downtrodden woman, the one being bossed, hurried and talked over by a stronger personality, and she played it across radio, film, sitcom and children's television for decades. It sounds like a limitation and it functioned as a franchise.
The film credits here are a lesson in how British comic actresses were used. She is the anxious patient in Carry On Doctor, a nurse in A Stitch in Time, and Henrietta Salt in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which is to say Veruca's mother. All three are uncredited. She is in one of the most watched children's films ever made and her name is not on it.
Television treated her considerably better. Till Death Us Do Part and its later companion In Sickness and in Health, where she played Mrs. Carey, put her inside one of the most argued about British sitcoms of its era. Super Gran made her Miz Witherspoon for a children's audience that has not forgotten it. She was also a fixture of Children's ITV through Playbox and Ragdolly Anna, work that reached a generation and left almost no trace on a filmography.
An authorised biography, written by Andrew Ross, was published in 2021.
Movies (3)
TV (3)
Where to start with Pat Coombs
To see what she actually did, go to In Sickness and in Health. Mrs. Carey is a real recurring part rather than a walk on, and the sitcom around her, awkward as parts of it have aged, gives her someone to be quietly flattened by, which is the exact register she owned.
For the films, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is the one everybody has already seen, so watch it once more knowing that the fretting mother beside the spoiled daughter is a professional doing precise work for no credit. Carry On Doctor is the same skill inside a much broader machine.
Super Gran is the nostalgia pick and the one British viewers of a certain age will want first. Till Death Us Do Part is the historical document, better studied than binged.