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Madeleine Angela Clinton-Baddeley (4 July 1904 – 22 February 1976) was an English stage and television actress, widely remembered for her role as household cook Mrs. Bridges in the period piece Upstairs, Downstairs. Her stage career spanned seven decades.
In 1912, Angela and Hermione enrolled as pupils at Margaret Morris's dancing school in Chelsea. Angela described the school as "a wonderful foundation for all my work on the stage."Angela Baddeley, ‘Since I Left the MMM School’, Margaret Morris Movement News Bulletin (November 1975), Fergusson Gallery, Perth. In the same year, the eight-year old Angela made her stage début at the Dalston Palace of Varieties, Dalston, in a play called The Dawn of Happiness. When she was nine, she auditioned at the Old Vic Theatre. In November 1915 she made her début at the Old Vic in Richard III, and she subsequently appeared in many other Shakespeare plays.
During her teenage years, the "consummate little actress", as a national newspaper had once called her when she was 10, starred in many musicals and .
Baddeley played the bawd in Tony Richardson's production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1958. She played Mistress Quickly in several episodes of the BBC Shakespeare history series An Age of Kings (1960), performing with her sister Hermione as Doll Tearsheet. In the original version of the television period drama Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–75) she played Mrs. Kate Bridges, the resident cook at 165 Eaton Place, who, when the series ended, married the butler, Mr. Angus Hudson (Gordon Jackson). A spin-off series featuring the characters' married life failed to materialise due to Baddeley's death. After the series ended, Baddeley replaced Hermione Gingold in the original London production of A Little Night Music.
Baddeley received a CBE in 1975 for "services to the theatre".
She was the grandmother of Charles Hart, lyricist of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, The Phantom of the Opera. She was the sister of actress Hermione Baddeley and a half-sister of the clergyman Bill Baddeley.
Baddeley died at Grayshott on 22 February 1976 from the epidemic influenza H1N1 (swine flu) aged 71, shortly after Upstairs, Downstairs ended its run.
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