Angela Bruce

Angela Bruce was born in Leeds to an English mother and Trinidadian father. Despite an inauspicious start in life after her mother was forced to place her in a children's home, where the matron considered her "too coloured" to be adopted, her life changed dramatically at the age of three, when she chose the family she wanted to adopt her. Bruce grew up as the only black child in a tiny mining village in England's northeast and enjoyed an idyllic rough-and-tumble childhood climbing trees and riding horses. Raised by her adoptive family to be happy in her own skin, she came of age after a Cinderella-like break into show business when the musical Hair came to Newcastle and she was plucked from the audience to dance on stage and later audition for the show, joining the cast ten days later to tour the UK for two years. Soon after that, she joined the original cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Since, then, in an acting career spanning five decades, she has played a myriad of characters on the stage, screen and radio. In 1975 she came to notice as Sandra Ling in the BBC's nursing-themed Angels (1975). Three years later, she was even more prominent as one half of a multiracial extramarital affair, the first of its kind, in Coronation Street (1960). In 2005, fittingly for an actress whose first big part was as a nurse, Bruce took the title role in the acclaimed TV drama-documentary Mary Seacole: The Real Angel of the Crimea (2005). (Mary Seacole being a Jamaican "doctress", a contemporary of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War who was famous for using herbal remedies to treat British soldiers, and Victorian Britain's first black celebrity.) Among the many television roles she has played, Bruce is popular among fans for her turns as D.S. Langford in EastEnders (1985), as Janice Stubbs in Coronation Street (1960), as prison warden Mandy Goodhue in Bad Girls (1999), as Brigadier Winifred Bambera in Doctor Who (1963), as Isabel in Takin' Over the Asylum (1994), and as Mrs. Justin in The Ghost Hunter (2000). Her theatre roles include the eponymous heroine in Educating Rita and Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera. She presented the BBC educational series Science Challenge and an episode of the BBC Civilisations series about the Roman presence in north-east England. She was made an ambassador for Derwentside, an honour bestowed upon local people who have raised the profile of England's northeast.