Andrée Melly

Melly was born on 15 December 1932 in Liverpool, Lancashire to Edith and Francis Melly. She made her stage début aged nine at the Little Theatre, Southport. After leaving Belvedere School, she attended the Swiss finishing school Mon Fertile, after which she acted in repertory theatre.^[1]

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.^[2] 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^[3] and in which she was a participant in the earliest known interracial kiss on television. She continued to appear on British television until 1991.^[4] 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.^[5][6]

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).^[7] Her role in the latter film was as Gina, a woman who is bitten by Baron Meinster, a vampire, turning her into another undead character.^[5]

She reported in an interview with the writer Oscar Martinez in the magazine Little Shoppe of Horrors that she had played the role of Dracula's bride because she wanted to explore varied characters. She had previously played, on BBC television, Joan of Arc, and Jo March in Little Women, and the first white woman who played opposite a black man in a romantic drama in the West End, Hot Summer Night. She also played a lesbian lead in The Killing of Sister George also in the West End, in keeping with unusual roles.

During the filming of The Brides of Dracula, she invited her older brother George Melly, who was writing the cartoon strip Flook (drawn by Trog) in The Daily Mail, to come to the film set to capture the filming of her climbing out of a coffin dressed as a vampire. George satirised his visit in his comic strip by having the character Flook visit a horror film studio that was employing his sister, who was playing a witch. The episode subsequently reappeared as a chapter on "My Little Sister" in George's fictional autobiography, I, Flook (1962), in which Andrée's character, Lucretia, is described as having "long ratty hair and not too clean", and "baleful malevolence" in her eyes.^[8]

When Oscar Martinez interviewed Melly and her husband, the actor Oscar Quitak, he called the interview, The Vampire Woman and the Hunchback because Quitak had played a hunchback in another Hammer horror film, The Revenge of Frankenstein.^[9]

Melly played Tony Hancock's girlfriend in two series of the Hancock's Half Hour (1955–56) radio series replacing Moira Lister.^[5][10] From 1967 to 1976, she was a regular panellist in the BBC radio comedy Just a Minute.^[5] Along with Sheila Hancock, she was one of the most regular female contestants, appearing in fifty-four episodes between 1967 and 1976.^[11] In 1972, she chaired an episode.^[12] She was the first panellist to win points for talking for the prescribed 60 seconds without hesitation, repetition or deviation.^[2] She also appeared in several episodes of The Benny Hill Show.^[2]

One of her two brothers, George Melly, was a jazz singer.^[10] She latterly lived in Ibiza with her husband.^[7] 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.^[13] Her husband survived her.

The appearances below have been sourced from the BBC Programmme Index.^[14]

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