Andrée Melly

Born in Liverpool, Lancashire, she performed at the Old Vic in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in her early twenties and worked with Peter Finch and Robert Donat at the theatre.[1] In 1958, she appeared with the Jamaican actor Lloyd Reckord in the Ted Willis play Hot Summer Night, a production which was later adapted for the Armchair Theatre series in 1959[2] and in which she was a participant in the earliest known interracial kiss on television. She continued to appear on British television until 1991.[3] Her other stage work includes the original West End production of the farce Boeing-Boeing at the Apollo Theatre in 1962 with David Tomlinson and as Alice "Childie" McNaught in The Killing of Sister George at St Martin's in 1966.[4][5]

Melly appeared in British films, including the comedy The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954) and the Hammer Horror film The Brides of Dracula (1960).[6] Her role in the later film was as Gina, a woman who is bitten by Baron Meinster, a vampire, turning her into another undead character.[4]

Re Brides of Dracula, Andree Melly reported in her interview to the writer Oscar Martinez in the magazine Little Shoppe of Horrors that she did the role of playing a vampire woman in Brides of Dracula because at that time in her career she wanted to explore varied characters - she had previously played in BBC television Joan of Arc and Jo in Little Woman and the first white woman who played opposite a black man in a romantic drama in the West End theater play Hot Summer Nights; subsequent she played a lesbian lead in The Killing of Sister George also WestEnd Theatre, in keeping with unusual roles. During the filming of the Brides of Dracula she invited her brother George Melly - who at the time of 1960 - was writing the famous cartoon strip Flook, to come to the set of the film to capture the filming of the sequence of her climbing out of a coffin and dressed as a vampire for the newspaper The Daily Mail that George Melly was writing for at the time. Concurrent with his visit to the sets George Melly incorporated his visit to the Brides of Dracula set to visit with his sister into the Flook comic strip by satirizing the event of having the character of Flook visit a horror film studio that was employing his sister who was a witch. When she married the actor Oscar Quitak and Oscar Martinez interviewed both her and her husband, he called the interview, The Vampire Woman and the Hunchback because Oscar Quitak had also appeared in another Hammer horror film, The Revenge of Frankenstein, in which Oscar Quitak played a hunchback. [7]

Melly played Tony Hancock's girlfriend in two series of the Hancock's Half Hour (1955–56) radio series replacing Moira Lister.[4][8] From 1967 to 1976, she was a regular panellist in the BBC radio comedy Just a Minute.[4] Along with Sheila Hancock, she was one of the most regular female contestants, appearing in fifty-four episodes between 1967 and 1976.[9] In 1972, she chaired an episode.[10] She was the first panellist to win points for talking for the prescribed 60 seconds without hesitation, repetition or deviation.[1] She also appeared in several episodes of The Benny Hill Show.[1]

One of her two brothers, George Melly, was a jazz singer.[8] She latterly lived in Ibiza with her husband Oscar Quitak.[6] The marriage produced two children.

With the death of Bill Kerr in 2014, Melly was the last surviving regular cast member of Hancock's Half Hour. Melly died on 31 January 2020 at the age of 87.[11] Her husband survived her.

• Andree Melly at IMDb
• Just a Minute Information site (Archived 25 October 2009)