Bella Emberg: Actress whose Blunder Woman antics made her a comedy hero

“It’s harder to make people laugh than it is to be serious,” said comedy actress Bella Emberg in an interview with Hospital Radio Chelmsford in 1998.

Emberg certainly always made comedy look effortless. Born Sybil Dyke in Brighton, she wanted to be an actress from an early age. However she did not make her professional debut until she was 25, when she spent the 1962 summer season in rep on the Isle of Wight.

Her career quickly gained traction after that with parts in TV police series Z Cars and its spin-off series Softly, Softly. But it was in comedy that Emberg truly made her mark. In 1981, she starred in Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part One. She also worked with Benny Hill, appearing in his eponymous show on many occasions. Of the much-maligned comedian, she said, “[He] was a genius was Ben … He loved the ladies and he always treated us with great respect.” And it was while she was working on the Benny Hill show that Emberg first met Russ Abbot.

Russ Abbot’s Madhouse and The Russ Abbot Show would provide Emberg with her most famous role, that of bungling superhero Blunder Woman, a Wonder Woman spoof with a suitably skimpy costume. Speaking in the Daily Mirror, she said, “The first time I saw the costume I said: ‘I am NOT wearing that!’... anyway I did and the first time I put it on I span round and my boobs fell out! I was always very careful after that.” But she went on to wear the costume anyway and Blunder Woman – the foil to Abbot’s hapless Cooperman – was an immediate hit.

Emberg sometimes found the workload on The Russ Abbot Show difficult. It was hard for her to learn her lines quickly, due to dyslexia, with which she was only diagnosed in her fifties. All the same Emberg credited Abbott, and particularly Blunder Woman, with saving her career, telling the Mirror, “I still view her as a complete blessing.”

open image in gallery

Emberg’s association with Abbot lasted for almost a decade. She appeared alongside him at a royal command performance at the London Palladium in 1988. She told Hospital Radio Chelmsford that moment was the highlight of her career. Not because she got a chance to perform for the royal family but because she got to meet her comedy heroes, the stars of the American series The Golden Girls. However after The Russ Abbott Show came to an end, Emberg said: “I couldn’t get work. I went for jobs and they’d say: ‘We’d love to hire you but you’re too well known with Russ’.”

She did find work eventually. Post-Blunder Woman, Emberg appeared in Doctor Who and made 50 episodes of a children’s show called Bear Behaving Badly. In 2015, she starred in Pompidou, a Matt Lucas series about an aristocrat down on his luck. Emberg continued to work right up until 2017, starring in a Sky One comedy In the Long Run, created by Idris Elba and due to be aired this year.

Hearing the news of Emberg’s death, her friend and co-star Russ Abbot said: “She was not only a great sport but a huge comedy talent. A genuinely funny woman, but most of all a woman of immense warmth and generosity. I count myself very lucky to have worked alongside her.”

Emberg didn’t marry or have children, saying that her career had always come first. She was never cast as a romantic heroine and her looks were often the punchline to the jokes she performed but when asked in that 1998 hospital radio interview whether she wouldn’t have liked to play Cinderella (she was in panto at the time), she said quite firmly: “Give me the ugly sister. You have much more fun.”

Bella Emberg, actress, born 16 September 1937, died 12 January 2018