Ruth Kettlewell

Ruth Kettlewell was an English actress born in Worcester in 1913. After small parts in amateur productions, she worked in repertory at the Little Theatre in Great Yarmouth, first with Aurora Productions, then with the Great Yarmouth Repertory Company. By the late 1950s she had small West End roles, and in 1959 she made her film debut in Room at the Top; she also performed in Norwegian in a Scandinavian children's film. In the 1960s she became a familiar television face, notably as Mrs Grace Pugh-Critchley, the Dean's wife, in early episodes of All Gas and Gaiters, and she had a small role in Cathy Come Home in 1966. Often cast as landladies and mothers-in-law, she appeared in Hope and Keens Crazy House in the early 1970s and later in Hope and Keen's Crazy Bus, continuing to act into her eighties. The Independent noted that such battleaxe roles kept her steadily employed for half a century.