Wendy Richard - Family and Early Life

Family and Early Life

Richard, an only child, was born in Middlesbrough in 1943. Her parents, Henry William (died in 1954) and Beatrice Reay (1910–1972) (née Cutter) Emerton, were publicans and ran the Corporation Hotel in the town. Emerton and Cutter married in Paddington in 1939. While Richard was a baby, her family moved to Bournemouth. Later they moved to the Isle of Wight and then to London, where they ran the Shepherds Tavern in Shepherd Market, where Elizabeth Taylor and Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon were said to be customers. Richard attended the local primary school, St George's, but her education was interrupted when her family moved again, this time to the Valentine Hotel at Gants Hill, then in Essex, now in Greater London. Another move, to the Streatham Park Hotel in south London, followed a few months later. It was here, in December 1954, that Richard's father committed suicide. The actress, then 11, found his body. Her mother Beatrice never remarried, and died of liver cancer in May 1972.

Richard was enrolled at the Royal Masonic School for Girls at Rickmansworth after her father's death, as Henry had been a Freemason, and help with fees was provided by the organisation. But she found the school rather "strict," and her art mistress called her paintings and drawings "affected, rather like herself." Richard dreamed of becoming a TV continuity girl or film star from a young age and, after leaving school at 15, helped to pay her way though the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London by working in the fashion department of Fortnum and Mason. It was at this time she decided to change her surname to Richard, because "it was short and neat." While at the Italia Conti, Richard appeared on television with Sammy Davis Jr in the ATV programme Sammy Meets the Girls, and also in No Hiding Place.