01/02/2026
Sheila Bernette: A True Players Performer
1931-2026
Sheila was a much-loved performer whose career spanned decades across television, film and the enduring music-hall and variety tradition. Yet perhaps what so many of us will remember most is the spirit with which she worked: warm, sharp, mischievous, and always utterly herself.
Many audiences first came to recognise Sheila through television. She became particularly well known for her appearances on Candid Camera, where she is remembered as one of the programme’s practical jokers, including her work with Peter Dulay in 1974.
She also became a familiar and much-loved face on The Good Old Days, including a particularly memorable appearance in July 1980 with fellow Players Theatre performer, Julia Sutton.
Sheila’s other television credits ranged widely, including The Dick Emery Show, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, and Butterflies. And for many, there was the pleasure of seeing her in Coronation Street, where she appeared in 1973 as Sister Delaney, in scenes involving Patricia
Phoenix’s Elsie Tanner following a road accident.
Sheila appeared in the 1970 Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium (hosted by Max Bygraves), featuring alongside Leslie Crowther on a bill that also included stars such as Andy Williams, Dionne Warwick, Caterina Valente, and Marty Feldman.
In 1970, Sheila appeared in the television series Music Hall, in a wonderfully glamorous line-up that included Tony Sandler, Ralph Young, Judy Carne, Norman Wisdom, Sid Caesar, and Jack Parnell and his Orchestra — a reminder of just how comfortably she worked among the stars of the age.
As her career continued, Sheila remained active and beloved by new generations of viewers. Many younger audiences discovered her through the series Hotel Trubble, where she played Mrs Poshington, the long-staying hotel guest. Her final film role was in Driving Aphrodite (2009).
Her work connected eras: the world of music hall and variety on one side, and contemporary character comedy on the other, an increasingly rare and precious bridge.
It is also fitting to remember the sheer breadth of her theatre work. Sheila appeared in productions and entertainments across the country.
At the Northcott Theatre, Exeter, she appeared in Pickwick, the musical based on Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, alongside English National Opera tenor Geoffrey Pogson, with Sheila as Mrs Bardell, a role that needs both comic timing and human warmth, which she had in abundance.
She also appeared in pantomimes, including Dick Whittington at the Theatre Royal Brighton (1984/5) with Christopher Biggins, as well as memories shared online of her being seen at the London Palladium in Aladdin (1970/71) with Cilla Black.
Sheila’s connection to the long golden thread of British musical theatre can be traced right back to The Boy Friend at Wyndham’s Theatre. The show, which began in 1953, transferred to Wyndham’s in early 1954, and ran for five years — and in 1956, Sheila appeared as a “guest” performer among colleagues including Eleanor McCready, Damon Desti, and Norman Warwick. It is extraordinary to think of that continuity: from early post-war theatre through to twenty-first-century television.
But for so many of us, Sheila’s name is especially bound up with The Players’ Theatre, its atmosphere, its tradition, its particular kind of affectionate irreverence. She is featured in the Players-related film/documentary A Little of What You Fancy, with Barry Cryer appearing as Chairman.
Sheila’s Players appearances were rich and varied, and the Players itself clearly suited her: its mixture of precision and playfulness, reverence for tradition balanced by a willingness to send it up.
She performed in the revived burletta Riquet with the Tuft (by J. R. Planché), adapted by Hattie Jacques and Joan Sterndale Bennett, presented at the Players on 20 December 1960, with choreography by John Heawood. The Stage (5 January 1961) praised the casting: “Sheila Burnette and John Heawood are well matched as a Puck-gone-wrong and a frustrated fairy.” The production was directed by Don Gemmell, with scenery and costumes by Reginald Woolley, and it is lovely to see Sheila’s work remembered so clearly in the historical record.
In 1967, she appeared with the Players’ Theatre Company in the show at the Adelphi, where Green Room Rag included a programme of Late Joys, with Barry Cryer once again as Chairman. Here Sheila’s rendering of “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow” was counted among the hits of the show, alongside performers such as Joan Sterndale Bennett (as Vesta Tilley), John Hewer, Teddy Green, Doreen Hermitage, Sheila Mathews, and John Rutland.
That mention of John Rutland is especially poignant, because one of the online tributes remembers the “wickedly funny” duets Sheila did with him — including the glorious moment when he meant to say “Meet you at the Pagoda” but accidentally said “Bodega”, causing helpless corpsing from both.
Sheila also appeared in The Players’ Theatre revival of H. G. Pelissier’s Follies, drawing material from the years 1900–1912, praised in The Stage (16 June 1983) for the quality of its songs and “lightness of texture”. This production was directed by Reginald Woolley, with dance and movement by Doreen Hermitage, musical arrangements by Geoffrey Brawn, and a cast including Nicholas Bennett, Pat Lancaster, Graham Richards, Teddy Green and Jenny Wren. It is hard to imagine the Players without artists like this, who could inhabit a bygone style without ever becoming museum pieces.
And the Players’ atmosphere itself — that curious marriage of theatre, club, magic and community— was captured beautifully in an observation in The Stage in 1977, describing it as “a unique hybrid of theatre and magic”, and suggesting that the secret of its success lies in the long collaboration and friendship between the same people, forming the root of it all. One cannot read those words without thinking of Sheila.
Her career also included major concerts and benefits. She was among the cast in a star-studded charity entertainment at the Pavilion, Hemel Hempstead, on 11 February 1968, with names including Leslie Crowther, Derek Nimmo, and Roy Castle. And she worked with many household stars across the years, including Dick Emery, Morecambe and Wise, and Tommy Cooper — without ever losing that Players sense of belonging to a tradition older and subtler than celebrity.
In later years, Sheila returned again and again to the Players stage, continuing to delight audiences.
In the 1990s, she performed sketches with Michael Kirk, including ‘The Ghost of Benjamin Binns', and another in which Michael played the Rev. Cyril Kirk, entertaining with poetry, music and dance — while Sheila, as his accompanist in the comic sense, created farce against the seriousness of the clergyman: a background character full of comic interruption, zig-zagging energy, and perfect timing. As a vicar myself, I confess I am always struck by how often clergy appear in farce — and Sheila clearly understood instinctively how to use the contrast: the clergyman’s earnest gravity against the gleeful disorder happening all around him.
That same impulse was evident in another production: in 1989 she appeared at the Theatre Royal, Margate in Philip King’s classic farce See How They Run — that wonderfully chaotic story of misunderstandings involving a clutch of clergymen, an escaped prisoner of war, an ex-actress, and more besides. The Stage (27 April 1989) described Sheila’s performance as Miss Skillon in memorably vivid terms: “Sheila Burnette as the much put upon, and sat upon, Miss Skillon, who creates a character of Cicely Courtneidge in a Hylda Baker body.”
At the Players, she also performed numbers that many remember with real affection: ‘Rosie’s Young Man,’ ‘Sweetheart’s Still,’ ‘They Always Pick On Me,’ and again of course ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow.’
One tribute recalls her singing “Give me a ticket to Heaven” with such pathos that she could make you cry and laugh — “still with that naughty twinkle in her eye.” Another remembers seeing her on New Year’s Eve 1988, singing what may have been called “Hello, TuToo”, and the delighted shout to the MC: “Follow that!”, to which he replied instantly: “I did… and I got my face slapped!” That, too, feels like Sheila: the spark, the quickness, the sense that the evening is always alive.
There is also the affectionate dressing-room camaraderie recalled online: “Such fun we all had in the dressing room for so many years.” And the delicious story of the admirer bringing bouquets: Sheila would thank him profusely, then hand them over and say, “Noel darling, put them with the others.” There never were any others!
Sheila’s generosity offstage mattered as much as her gifts onstage. Her friend and fellow actor Peter Kosta spoke movingly of how she offered him lodgings when he was looking for digs: “If you’re clean, I have a spare room.” He remembered that she supported him in everything he did and came to see him whenever she could — and he recalled visiting her shortly before her death, spending nearly two hours talking together “about the good old days.” He described her as “very funny” and “very feisty” — and one feels those words will ring true to anyone who knew her.
Sheila also toured with the Players to the USA, another reminder of how far the Players spirit travelled — and how Sheila was part of carrying that tradition beyond Britain, bringing this particular form of performance to audiences who perhaps had never experienced anything quite like it.
Sheila’s life in performance seems to form a kind of thread running through modern British entertainment. But to those of us who love the Players, she belongs especially to that world: that mix of artistry and mischief, discipline and delight, glamour and intimacy.
Sheila brought warmth, comic sparkle, and true music-hall spirit wherever she performed.
Her death marks the passing of someone who not only entertained, but embodied a tradition that can feel increasingly rare, and at the Players, that special family warmth in which audience and performers felt part of the same room, the same world.
May she rest in peace, and may her memory continue to brighten the Players, as I know it will, for many years to come.
Rev Lee Taylor
