Instead, she decided on drama and won a scholarship to Rada, departing for London and lodgings in Shepherds Hill, Highgate, aged only 16. As she went on to Cardiff high school for girls she received much encouragement from Rae Jenkins, principal conductor of the BBC Welsh Orchestra, who believed she could become an opera singer. In 1947, Ann was a member of the renowned Snowflakes children’s choir which won the inaugural Llangollen Eisteddfod. The family moved to Cardiff and opened an ice-cream parlour. But the theatrical credentials of this bright-eyed, full-voiced pocket dynamo (just five feet tall) were established in the 1960s when she was a stalwart of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East, appearing in the premieres of Lionel Bart’s Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (as one of the sex workers singing a lewd G’night Dearie with Carmel Cryan), Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Oh! What a Lovely War and in the West End, as orange-eating Barbara with Albert Finney in Billy Liar (1960) at the Cambridge.Īnn’s grandfather, Albert Beach, was the mayor of Wolverhampton, where she was born to Claude Beach, a grocer, and his wife, Rebecca (nee Van Startup).
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