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| Jean Boht |
Born Jean Dance on the 6th of March 1932 and grew up in a three-bedroom semi in Bebington on the Wirral. She was set to be an actress from an early age - her father ran the local concert party and wrote scenes for her and her sister Maureen to perform. A pupil at Wirral Grammar School for Girls she then trained at the Liverpool Playhouse Theatre before making her stage debut in 1962. Her career then took her across the country as she had moved to London in 1964 just as the West End was welcoming actors with regional accents and she made many stage appearances in a variety of theatres. She said, "Albert Finney had made Northern accents acceptable, so I dropped my received pronunciation and tried to be as broad as I could."
She broke into television in 1971 with small parts in shows such as 'Softly, Softly: Task Force' (1971) and 'Z-Cars ' (1973) before a more substantial role as Mrs Bannister in 6 episodes of the drama 'Couples' (1975). More appearances followed in 'Last of the Summer wine' (1977), 'Some Mother's Do 'Ave 'Em' (1978), 'Boys From The Blackstuff' (1982) before winning bigger roles in 'Julirt Bravo' (1981), 'Scully' (1984), as Mrs Harrison in the Carla Lane sitcom 'I Woke Up One Morning' (1985-86), and then, of course, 'Bread' (1986-91).
However she became most famous for the role of Nellie Boswell in Carla Lane's sitcom 'Bread'. The series focused on the extended Boswell family of Liverpool who lived in the Dingle area of the city. The family were Catholic and working class and, led by the acid-tongued matriarch Nellie Boswell who ruled over her family with an iron fist, resulted in Jean Boht becoming a comedy icon as the matriarch of TV’s favourite family in the 1980s. The early series focused on her children attempting to make enough money, or 'bread', to support the family through various illicit means. The family were experts at exploiting the system to get by in life and despite the fact that none of the Boswells seemed to be officially employed, they managed to live a fairly good life thanks to government handouts and various cash-in-hand jobs.
Nellie's philandering, free-spirited husband Freddie spent most of the series with one foot in the family household, and the other with his mistress, the red-haired Irish siren Lilo Lil of whom Nellie frequently declared about in a storm of rage: "She is a tart!"
A regular scenario in each episode was that of Nellie opening a cockerel-fashioned kitchen egg-basket prior to the evening meal into which the family would place money for their upkeep. The amount of money placed in the pot by each depended on how successful a day they'd had. The pot would be at the forefront of the screen at the end of each episode as the credits rolled.
Liverpool born writer Carla Lane became the first woman to mine television comedy from sexual and personal relationships through a host of expertly-etched contemporary characters, developed against a backdrop of social issues such as divorce, adultery and.. alcoholism." The show was popular, and received audiences over 21 million and by the late 1980s 'Bread' had the third-highest viewing figures on British television, beaten only by 'EastEnders' and 'Neighbours'.
Jean sadly passed away on Tuesday 12th of September 2023 after battling Vascular Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease and only a few weeks after the death of her beloved husband Carl Davis
see next :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2018/09/merseyside-mirth-makers-george-roper.html?q=derek+nimmo
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