Biography
Vivian Kay Pickles, an English character actress, is one of three siblings born in London and educated at Le Collège Féminin de Bouffément in Paris, a women's college founded in 1924. Her uncle was Wilfred Pickles, an experienced actor and radio broadcaster. Vivian began her acting career at fourteen, starring in the lead role of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1946) in an early BBC television production. She trained as a dancer at the Aida Foster Drama School before moving on to repertory theatre and West End revues, alongside screen appearances. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, she received widespread acclaim for her roles in the new wave of 'kitchen sink' realism plays by writers such as John Osborne and Willis Hall.
On screen, Vivian gained recognition with the lead role in Ken Russell's biopic Isadora (1966), earning Best Actress at the 1967 Monte Carlo International TV Festival. She followed this success with two notable roles: as the bohemian academic Alva Hodson in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and as the unsentimental, controlling socialite mother of Harold Chasen in Hal Ashby's black comedy Harold and Maude (1971). New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted, "Because Vivian Pickles is an actress particularly skilled at emphasizing understatement, many of Mrs. Chasen's responses to Harold's bleak pranks are as humorous as intended." Vivian also appeared in two Lindsay Anderson films: O Lucky Man! (1973) and, as Matron, in the satirical Britannia Hospital (1982).
On television, Vivian frequently took on significant supporting roles in literary adaptations and period dramas: Catherine Linton in Wuthering Heights (1948), Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (1967), Mary Stuart in Elizabeth R (1971), Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), Beatrice, Maxim de Winter's talkative sister, in Rebecca (1979), Martha Yellan in Jamaica Inn (1983), Mrs. Shipley in The Lives of Benjamin Franklin (1974), and the formidable Aunt Dahlia in Jeeves and Wooster (1990). She also lent her voice to BBC radio dramatizations, portraying P.G. Wodehouse's Aunt Dahlia, girls' school headmistress Dame Daphne Winkworth (1989), and Mrs. Cratchit in the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol (1990). Between 1969 and 1978, she made numerous appearances as a storyteller on the children's program Jackanory (1965) and had a recurring role as eccentric scientist Cynthia Birdwood in the early 1990s children's show Uncle Jack. Vivian retired from acting in 1999 after a guest role as a retired schoolteacher in a 1997 episode of Midsomer Murders.
