Born Joyce Irene Phipps on 10 February 1910 in London to American parents whose family connection included Nancy Astor as her mother’s sister, the future performer liked to call herself “three fourths American.” An early passion for the stage led her to study briefly at RADA, yet she married Reginald Grenfell in 1929 and turned first to commercial art, magazine contributions for Punch and Country Life, and more than three years as radio critic for the Observer. A chance encounter with humorist Steven Potter, who enjoyed her account of a recent Women’s Institute lecture, brought her to producer Herbert Farjeon and a place in The Little Revue of 1939.
Further Farjeon productions followed in the early forties—Diversion, Diversion No. 2 and Light And Shade—before she joined ENSA in 1944 for an extensive tour of the Near and Far East and India, delivering comic monologues and songs to British troops in military hospitals. The OBE arrived in 1946. At the Piccadilly Theatre in Sigh No More the following year she appeared as a schoolgirl in Noël Coward’s “That Is The End Of The News” and introduced her own “Du Maurier,” written with Richard Addinsell; the pair later supplied material for Tuppence Coloured in 1947 and Penny Plain in 1951. Radio work intensified with regular appearances on We Beg To Differ and service as the British host of Transatlantic Quiz, while film opportunities began with wartime propaganda shorts and the 1943 comedy The Demi-Paradise opposite Laurence Olivier and Margaret Rutherford.
She rejoined Rutherford in The Happiest Days Of Your Life in 1949 and shared the screen with Alastair Sim in the late-fifties St. Trinians series, emerging unscathed alongside him; additional screen roles, often brief but memorable, included Here Comes The Bride, The Galloping Major, Pickwick Papers, The Million Pound Note and The Americanization Of Emily. Stage authorship claimed centre stage in 1954 when she supplied book and lyrics, again to Addinsell’s music, for Joyce Grenfell Requests The Pleasure, which ran nearly a year in London before reaching Broadway in 1955. While in America she shaped her solo programme, toured major cities and appeared several times on The Ed Sullivan Show, once sharing the bill with Elvis Presley, whom she later described as “a pasty-faced plump boy.” London first saw the one-woman format in 1957 at the Lyric as Joyce Grenfell—A Miscellany; Australia received it under the title Meet Joyce Grenfell. Further international touring occupied the sixties, with three additional visits to Australia, until failing eyesight in one eye prompted retirement from the stage in the early seventies.
During the six years that remained she issued two volumes of autobiography, Joyce Grenfell Requests The Pleasure and In Pleasant Places, before cancer claimed the sight of her second eye and she died in London on 30 November 1979. Broadcasting remained a constant; from 1966 she sat regularly on the television panel Face The Music and fronted her own BBC2 series. Her gently humorous, acutely observed portraits of society—delivered through signature pieces such as the theme “I’m Going To See You Today,” “Stately As A Galleon,” “Maude,” “Nursery School,” “A Terrible Worrier,” “Time,” “Three Brothers” and “It’s Almost Tomorrow,” together with the Norman Wisdom duets “Narcissus” and “I Don’t ’Arf Love You”—won her audiences far beyond Britain, especially in the United States. One of her most cherished numbers, “I Like Life,” echoed her own outlook: “I am not interested in the pursuit of happiness, but only in the discovery of joy.” Reginald Grenfell, who edited several of her books, survived her until 1993. In 1988 the revue Re: Joyce!, described as “a diverting and engaging mixture of anecdotal biography and quintessential sketch material” and starring Maureen Lipman with Denis King, opened in London and returned at intervals throughout the nineties.
