Biographie
Hazel Douglas enjoyed a late-career resurgence portraying scatter-brained yet often sharp-tongued matriarchs over an eight-decade-long career.
Beginning professionally with Harry Hanson's Court Players in the early 1940s, she was most recently recognized on television as Derek Jacobi's acerbic mother in Vicious, seemingly unaware that his flatmate Ian McKellen was also his life partner.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010), she played Bathilda Bagshot, the resurrected host of Voldemort's deadly snake—markedly different from her early repertory work in Jersey, Aldershot, and with the Carl Bernard Company.
Born Hazel Mary Smith in Fulham, London, and briefly evacuated to Newbury during the Second World War preparations, Douglas spent a year at RADA alongside peers like Richard Attenborough and worked briefly as an assistant stage manager before serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service.
After the war, she debuted in the West End in a Sunday-night performance of Michael Pearson's Against the Tide at the Whitehall Theatre in 1948.
In 1953, she appeared in See How They Run, the inaugural production at the Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, and returned to the Whitehall Theatre in 1954 for John Chapman's farce Dry Rot, marking her first role with Brian Rix's resident company there.
Over the following decade and beyond, Douglas became a regular with Rix's farce troupe at the Whitehall while also appearing in Bernard Kops' Change for the Angel (Arts Theatre, 1960), Trelawny of the Wells (Leatherhead Theatre, 1969), and Michael Pertwee's She's Done It Again (Garrick Theatre, 1969).
She returned to the West End in 1974, sharing the stage with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray in The Sack Race at the Ambassadors Theatre. The next year, The Stage praised her "towering performance of all-devouring strength" as Lady Monchensey in T.S. Eliot's The Family Reunion in Ipswich.
In 1978, Douglas co-founded Southern Exchange, a joint touring collaboration among Swindon's Wyvern Theatre, Poole Arts Centre, and the Hexagon Theatre in Reading.
She appeared alongside Anna Neagle in Noel Coward's Relative Values to reopen the Connaught Theatre, Worthing, in 1983 and starred with Harry Worth in Ray Galton and Alan Simpson's Rockefeller and the Red Indians at Basingstoke's Haymarket Theatre in 1987.
Earlier that year, she played the title role in Chris Martin's Who Killed Hilda Murrell? with the TyneWear Theatre Company.
Her only Broadway appearance came in 1965 in Bill Naughton's comedy All in Good Time.
Douglas's steady screen career, which began in 1947, accelerated in later years with roles in Where the Heart Is (1998-99), At Home With the Braithwaites (2000-03), The Worst Week of My Life (2004), as well as episodes of Gavin and Stacey (2008) and Psychoville (2011).
Hazel Douglas was born on November 2, 1923, and passed away on September 8, 2016, at the age of 92.
