Noel Dyson

Noel Dyson
Born	23 December 1916 Manchester, England
Died	June 1995 (aged 78) Cheltenham, England
Years active	1938 – 1995

Noel Dyson (23 December 1916, Manchester – June 1995, Cheltenham) was an English actress. Dyson appeared in a number of films but is best remembered as a versatile television actress who became a very familiar face to British viewers in a career spanning almost 50 years. Dyson's most famous roles were Ida Barlow, one of the original characters in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street (1960–61), and Nanny in the sitcom Father, Dear Father (1968–73).

Early life and career

Dyson was born into a wealthy Manchester family, and was educated at the prestigious Roedean School in Sussex. Following a spell at a finishing school in Paris, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London from where she graduated in 1938. Initially she played in various repertory companies around England, including Birmingham, Oxford and Windsor, before moving on to London's West End.

During World War II Dyson temporarily gave up acting to become a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. She returned to the profession, initially mainly in stage productions, then from the late 1940s started to become involved with television productions at the time when the fledgling British TV industry was starting to make the transition from the preserve of the establishment classes towards the mainstream popular entertainment medium it would increasingly become from the early 1950s onwards. Dyson's first known TV credit came in a 1948 BBC production The Guinea Pig, and for the next decade or so she would appear, mainly in one-off supporting roles, in a number of TV productions as well as a handful of films. Her most significant roles in this period included seven appearances in the series The Vise (first broadcast in the U.S. between October 1954 and December 1955, but not shown on TV in the UK until 1957-59) and a BBC adaptation of The Secret Garden in 1960.

Coronation Street

In 1960 Dyson was cast in the role of Ida Barlow in the newly-commissioned series Coronation Street, produced by the Manchester-based Granada Television and set in a fictional working class district of Salford. Ida was married to Frank Barlow, a postman, and had two sons, Ken and David. She was written as a calm-natured, placid character who frequently had to act as mediator between her hot-headed husband and Ken, whose upwardly-mobile aspirations were seen by Frank as a rejection of his family background.

The initial commission for Coronation Street ran to 13 episodes. The first episode aired on 9 December 1960 and was panned by TV critics, who predicted a short-lived ignominious fate for the programme. However the series became an instant hit with viewers who had never before seen a TV drama dealing with the lives of ordinary working people in the North of England. By March 1961 Coronation Street was topping the British TV ratings with an estimated 75% of all television-owning households in the UK tuning in, and Granada decided to extend its run indefinitely. This proved to be a problem for Dyson, who had only evisaged a limited commitment to the programme. Coronation Street was produced in Manchester while Dyson's home and family were now in London, and she did not feel able to commit to ongoing lengthy absences, so when her contract came up for renewal she declined to sign. The programme's producers decided that rather than replacing Dyson with another actress, which they felt would be unpopular with viewers, Ida would be the first regular character to die. No death scene was filmed, but in the episode of 6 September 1961 it was announced that Ida had been knocked down and killed by a bus. Her "funeral" episode set a new programme record for viewing figures.^{[citation needed]}

Later career

During the 1960s Dyson continued to appear regularly on TV, but chose either one-off productions for strands such as the BBC's The Wednesday Play and ITV's Play of the Week or supporting roles in popular shows such as Z-Cars, Dixon of Dock Green and The Likely Lads. However she took the role of Nanny in the Thames Television sitcom Father, Dear Father which ran for seven series between 1968 and 1973 and also spawned a spin-off film in 1973. Her only other long-running TV role came as the long-suffering wife of Arthur Lowe in the sitcom Potter between 1979 and 1983 but she continued to make cameo appearances in many top-rated shows such as Me and My Girl, London's Burning, Bergerac, Prime Suspect and Casualty until shortly before her death. She also appeared as John Hurt's mother in the 1983 film Champions. Her last credit was an episode of Heartbeat, broadcast posthumously in September 1995.^[1]

Private life and death

Dyson was married twice, to Kenneth Edwards and Harry Judge. She died of cancer in June 1995, aged 78.^[2]

References

1. ^ Noel Dyson @ IMDb.com
2. ^ British Film Institute database

External links

• Noel Dyson page @ Corrie.net

Persondata
Name	Dyson, Noel
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	23 December 1916
Place of birth	Manchester, England
Date of death	1995
Place of death	Cheltenham, England