FeedMollie Sugden — Mrs. Slocombe Actress — Dies
Written by NetBear on July 4, 2009 – 6:16 pm -Mollie Sugden, the actress who played the plucky Mrs. Slocombe in Are You Being Served? has died at the age of 86.
Sugden found early TV success with comedy series Hugh and I in 1962 and in Coronation Street as the gossiping Nellie Harvey. But it was The Liver Birds in the late 1960s and early 1970s that enabled her to make her first real impact, as Nerys Hughes’ snobbish mother Mrs Hutchinson. And then in 1972 came Are You Being Served? and the role she became best known for - the blue-rinsed Betty Slocombe, with her affectation of middle-class gentility and her outrageous use of the double-entendre.
Sugden went on to have her own slot on consumer programme That’s Life and even found new fame in the US where re-runs of Are You Being Served? transformed both Sugden and co-star John Inman into cult figures in the early 1990s.
