It was once said of the actor Barbara Ferris, who has died aged 88, that she was the only one of Joan Littlewood’s girls at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in London, who started out working-class and ended up middle-class.
Her father had a milk round in Soho after the second world war. Barbara progressed from training at the Italia Conti stage school, to fashion modelling and dancing – in Cole Porter’s Can-Can and The Pajama Game, Bob Fosse’s first show as a choreographer – at the London Coliseum in 1954-55, to important roles in plays by Edward Bond and David Hare at the Royal Court. In 1966, she was in a starring role opposite Donald Sinden in Terence Frisby’s West End long-runner There’s a Girl in My Soup (her role in the subsequent film was taken by Goldie Hawn).
