Wendy Craig: All The Laughs & More

Wendy Craig is the much-loved star of TV series such as Butterflies and The Royal. This feature-length celebration of her life and career features an exclusive new interview with Wendy, recorded at her home, as she retraces the moments that made her a sitcom superstar.

Wendy was born in County Durham in 1934 as Anne Gwendolyn Craig. She reveals that she first set her sights on an acting career at the age of three after seeing a pantomime in Newcastle. At drama school in London in the early 1950s, a performance she gave alongside fellow trainee and future Sherlock Holmes star Jeremy Brett was so impressive that she picked up both her first professional acting job and an agent in the same evening.

By the 1960s, Wendy was carving out a career playing fragile and vulnerable women in British movie classics such as The Servant and The Nanny, and sharing the screen with luminaries such as Dirk Bogarde, Bette Davis and Oliver Reed.

After 1967, her shift into TV sitcoms such as Not In Front Of The Children and ...And Mother Makes Three marked a sea change in her career. Her friends and fans agree that 1978's Butterflies is her greatest success, giving her an opportunity to blend the fragility and daffiness of her previous screen work to create an exciting new character: the bored housewife Ria Parkinson - famously unlucky in the kitchen and tempted to have an affair to spice up her unfulfilled home life.

Wendy soon found herself receiving sack loads of fan mail from viewers who believed that their own unhappy lives were being charted on screen, in what series creator Carla Lane described as a 'situation tragedy'. Few realised that Lane was initially overwhelmed by memories of Craig's earlier work as ditzy mothers and unhappy about the idea of casting her as Ria. Fortunately, BBC comedy executive John Howard Davies changed her mind.

Wendy's work on comedies such as Butterflies, and dramas like Nanny and The Royal, earned her a reputation for playing sympathetic characters with a strong maternal streak. But in 2017, the creators of ITV's Unforgotten drama series turned that on its head by casting her as a mother who had allowed her husband to abuse their children in one of the year's most upsetting TV moments.

Wendy is joined by her family, friends and co-stars such as Michael Starke, David Parfitt and Bruce Montague sharing affectionate memories from their time on set with an actor they describe as being very like Ria Parkinson - except that she really can cook.