Maria Charles

Actress

September 22, 1929 (93 years)

† April 21, 2023

London, England, UK

Biography

No biography available.

Filmography

6.2

Casualty

Miss Phelan

Drama series about the staff and patients at Holby City Hospital's emergency department, charting the ups and downs in their personal and professional lives.

5.3

Coronation Street

Lena Thistlewood

The residents of Coronation Street are ordinary, working-class people, and the show follows them through regular social and family interactions at home, in the workplace, and in their local pub, the Rovers Return Inn. Britain's longest-running soap.

6.6

Play for Today

Rita Green

Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.

8.1

Skins

Granny

Irreverent comedy drama which follows the messy lives, loves, delirious highs and inevitable lows of a group of raucous teenage friends in Bristol.

5.7

Crown Court

Joyce Farrington

Crown Court is an afternoon television courtroom drama produced by Granada Television for the ITV network that ran from 1972, when the Crown Court system replaced Assize courts and Quarter sessions in the legal system of England and Wales, to 1984.

7.6

Bad Girls

Noreen Biggs

Bad Girls is a British television drama series that was broadcast on ITV from 1 June 1999 to 20 December 2006 and starred Simone Lahbib, Mandana Jones, Debra Stephenson, Linda Henry, Jack Ellis and many more throughout the eight-year run. The series was broadcast in 17 countries and was produced by Shed Productions, the company which later produced Footballers' Wives and Waterloo Road. It is set in the fictional women's prison of Larkhall, and features a mixture of serious and light storylines focusing on the prisoners and staff of G Wing. From 2010, the UK broadcast rights were bought by CBS Drama, and is repeated regularly – as of September 2012, the channel is re-running the series again in a late-night time slot.

7.4

Lovejoy

Alice

The adventures of the eponymous Lovejoy, a likeable but roguish antiques dealer based in East Anglia. Within the trade, he has a reputation as a “divvie”, a person with an almost supernatural powers for recognising exceptional items as well as distinguishing genuine antique from clever fakes or forgeries.

7.7

Secret Army

Louise Colbert

World War II drama about covert organisation Lifeline helping allied airmen escape after being shot down in occupied Europe, working with the Resistance and hiding from the Gestapo.

6.0

ScreenPlay

Sylvia Pinker

Screenplay was a drama anthology television series, broadcast on BBC between 1986 and 1993. Numerous episodes were produced including one named "Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Islands" starring Robbie Coltrane as English writer Samuel Johnson who in the autumn of 1773, visits the Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland. That episode was directed by John Byrne and co-starred John Sessions and Celia Imrie.

7.6

Hot Fuzz

Mrs. Reaper

Former London constable Nicholas Angel finds it difficult to adapt to his new assignment in the sleepy British village of Sandford. Not only does he miss the excitement of the big city, but he also has a well-meaning oaf for a partner. However, when a series of grisly accidents rocks Sandford, Angel smells something rotten in the idyllic village.

7.7

Shine on Harvey Moon

Mrs. McIntyre

Shine on Harvey Moon! is a British comedy-drama series made by Central Television for ITV from 8 January 1982 to 23 August 1985 and briefly revived in 1995 by Meridian. This generally light-hearted series was created by comedy writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. The series is set in the East End of London shortly after the Second World War. Upon being demobbed RAF serviceman Harvey Moon, played by Kenneth Cranham, returns home and finds his family involved in various troubles. His wife Rita, played by Maggie Steed, is not interested in resuming their relationship, and works in a seedy nightclub frequented by American servicemen. He becomes involved with the Labour Party and the union movement. The name of the series is a wordplay on the title of the popular 1908 song 'Shine On, Harvest Moon'. The first series was commissioned and recorded by ATV at their Elstree studios with the remaining series filmed at newly constructed facilities in Nottingham.

7.0

Never the Twain

Mrs Sadler

Never the Twain is a British sitcom that ran for eleven series from 7 September 1981 to 9 October 1991. It was created by Johnnie Mortimer, and was the only sitcom he ever created without his usual writing partner, Brian Cooke. Mortimer wrote the entirety of the first two series and four episodes out of six of the eighth, with the rest being mainly written by Vince Powell and John Kane. It starred Windsor Davies and Donald Sinden as rival antique dealers, and also starred Derek Deadman, Zara Nutley, Robin Kermode, Tacy Kneale, Julia Watson, Honor Blackman, Teddy Turner and Maria Charles. The title is taken from the Rudyard Kipling poem; The Ballad of East and West.

7.3

The Basil Brush Show

Mrs String

The Basil Brush Show was a British children's television sitcom series, starring the glove puppet fox, Basil Brush. It was produced for six series by The Foundation, airing on CBBC from 4 October 2002 to 21 December 2007. The show is a spin-off from the original 1960's/1970's BBC television series, but without any of the original cast.

4.6

Country Matters

Mrs Hartop

An anthology series adapted from plays and short stories by A.E Coppard and H.E. Bates, depicting English country life and rural romance at the turn of the 20th-century. It presents unsentimental stories of human relationships and raw emotions – heartfelt passions, crippling frustrations, unspoken love and destructive jealousy.

6.0

Plays for Britain

Hilda

An anthology series of six contemporary plays from writers at relatively early stages in their careers.

7.3

Victor/Victoria

Madame President

A struggling female soprano finds work playing a male female impersonator, but it complicates her personal life.

N/A

The Galton & Simpson Playhouse

Phyllis

A series of seven individual sitcom pilots from writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

6.4

Revenge of the Pink Panther

Lady Client

Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau is dead. At least that is what the world—and Charles Dreyfus—believe when a dead body is discovered in Clouseau's car after being shot off the road. Naturally, Clouseau knows differently and, taking advantage of not being alive, sets out to discover why an attempt was made on his life.

7.2

Great Expectations

Sarah Pocket

Orphan Pip discovers through lawyer Mr Jaggers that a mysterious benefactor wishes to ensure that he becomes a gentleman. Reunited with his childhood patron, Miss Havisham, and his first love, the beautiful but emotionally cold Estella, he discovers that the elderly spinster has gone mad from having been left at the altar as a young woman, and has made her charge into a warped, unfeeling heartbreaker.

10.0

Six Days of Justice

Liz Roper

Six Days of Justice is a British television drama anthology series of single plays created by Thames Television and shown on ITV from 1972 to 1975, over four seasons of six episodes apiece.