ALICE SAPRITCH 1916-1990

Pretty much unknown outside of the French speaking world, this great comic actress was a lady who knew how to wear a turban and wield a cigarette-holder. Battleaxe of the first order, she was a throwback to the 1920s and enormously popular in French comedy both on screen and in the theatre, where strangely enough, to my knowledge, she never played Lady Bracknell in any French production of "The Importance of Being Ernest", a role which could have been written for her. Her gravelly voice and strong bone structure elicited mischievous suggestions that she was a transvestite, but she was in fact a great beauty in her youth. Although she was inseparable from her partner Guillaume Hanoteau for 25 years, she never married and in her old age surrounded herself with young gay men, because, as she explained: "They are single. And they have cars. I always go out with two of them, one to drive the car, and the other to open the door for me." Of Turkish ancestry and educated in Brussels, she shares these two things with another great eccentric, Boris Johnson. She is probably best remembered for is her series of TV ads for cleaning products in the 1980s.