Caroline Blakiston

Chelsea, London, England, UK

Biography

Caroline Blakiston (born 13 February 1933) is an English actress. Best known for her role in the television comedy series Brass, she has also appeared as Mon Mothma in the science-fiction film Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. In the 1960s she appeared in three episodes of The Avengers as well a number of ITC productions such as The Saint and the 1969 Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) episode "Never Trust a Ghost". She appeared to great acclaim as Marjorie Ferrar in the BBC Television adaptation of Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga in 1967. In 1977 she appeared in Raffles as Lady Paulton, and also in Murder Most English as Helen Carobleat. In 1986 Blakiston played the villain Bess Sedgwick, opposite Joan Hickson's Miss Marple, in "At Bertram's Hotel", made by the BBC and shown on the PBS series Mystery in the U.S. She also appeared as Lionel Hardcastle's ex-wife in an episode of As Time Goes By. She and Geoffrey Palmer (Lionel) had previously played estranged spouses a decade earlier in Carla Lane's series The Last Song.

Movies

Brass is a British comedy-drama series made by Granada Television for ITV and eventually Channel 4. Set mostly in Utterley, a fictional Lancashire mining town in the 1930s, Brass was a comedy satirising the working-class period dramas of the 1970s and the American supersoaps such as Dallas and Dynasty. Unusually for ITV comedies of the time, there was no laughter track and the humour deliberately kept extremely dry, using convoluted wordplay and subtle commentary on popular culture. Brass is northern English slang for "money" as well as for "effrontery". The series also gleefully parodied the 1977 Granada TV dramatisation of Dickens' Hard Times, which also starred Timothy West. The series, created by John Stevenson and Julian Roach, was set around two feuding families—the wealthy Hardacres and the poor, working-class Fairchilds, who lived in a small terraced house rented from the Hardacre empire. The Hardacre family was headed by the ruthless self-made businessman Bradley, who espoused Thatcherite rhetoric while coming up with various harebrained schemes to make his businesses more efficient so he could sack workers, and his alcoholic aristocratic wife Lady Patience. The head of the Fairchilds was the stern "Red" Agnes, who spread militant socialist rhetoric around the Hardacre mine, mill and munitions factory, and her doltish, forelock-tugging husband George, who is dominated by his wife and his boss. In a twist, Agnes was also Bradley Hardacre's mistress.

More info
Brass
1983