Andrée Melly

Andrée Melly (15 September 1932 – 31 January 2020) was an English actress.

Born in Liverpool, Lancashire, she performed at the Old Vic in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral in her early twenties and worked with Peter Finch and Robert Donat at the theatre. In 1958, she appeared with the Jamaican actor Lloyd Reckord in the Ted Willis play Hot Summer Night, a production which was later adapted for the Armchair Theatre series in 1959 and in which she was a participant in the earliest known interracial kiss on television. She continued to appear on British television until 1991. Her other stage work includes the original West End production of the farce Boeing-Boeing at the Apollo Theatre in 1962 with David Tomlinson and as Alice "Childie" McNaught in The Killing of Sister George at St Martin's in 1966.

Melly appeared in British films, including the comedy The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954) and the Hammer Horror film The Brides of Dracula (1960). Her role in the latter film was as Gina, a woman who is bitten by Baron Meinster, a vampire, turning her into another undead character.

She reported in an interview with the writer Oscar Martinez in the magazine Little Shoppe of Horrors that she had played the role of Dracula's bride because she wanted to explore varied characters. She had previously played, on BBC television, Joan of Arc, and Jo March in Little Women, and the first white woman who played opposite a black man in a romantic drama in the West End, Hot Summer Night. She also played a lesbian lead in The Killing of Sister George also in the West End, in keeping with unusual roles.

During the filming of the Brides of Dracula, she invited her brother George Melly, who was writing the cartoon strip Flook (drawn by Trog) in The Daily Mail, to come to the film set to capture the filming of her climbing out of a coffin and dressed as a vampire. George Melly satirized his visit in his comic strip by having the character Flook visit a horror film studio that was employing his sister, who was playing a witch.

When Oscar Martinez interviewed Melly and her husband, the actor Oscar Quitak, he called the interview, The Vampire Woman and the Hunchback because Quitak had played a hunchback in another Hammer horror film, The Revenge of Frankenstein.; in 1962, George Melly wrote a book called "I, Flook" as an autobiography "with drawings by Trog" which published a narrative with some of the original comic strips from the original Daily Mail newspaper strip which satired George Melly's sister Andree Melly's appearance in Brides of Dracula. The little book was published by Macmillan & Co LTD in England and by St. Martin's press in USA and contains multiple chapters on the character of Flook and other known Flook characters including Bodger and his sister Lucretia and the chapter that satirizes his sister's appearance in Brides of Dracula with new narrative written for the book and a few of the original Trog drawing but not the complete strip is chapter 3 and is titled, "My Little Sister" where the character Bodger has a sister called Lucretia who is a witch and reads books by Alister Crowley and is appearing in a horror film. He describes his sister, as the character Lucretia, as having "long ratty hair and not too clean" with "baleful malevolence" in her eyes and she can cast spells. The basic narrative is "Rufus and I were employed by Mallet Films, a studio specializing in horror pictures and Lucretia had selected their premises as an ideal venue...". with Mallet Films being a pun on Hammer Films. George Melly in this satire describes the studio canteen as "... a place where a werewolf is eating roast beef ... sitting next to a vampire complaining that she has just dropped some jelly on her shroud...". The chapter does not contain any candid behind the scenes photos of the film shooting of Brides of Dracula which Andree Melly says in her interview with Oscar Martinez that her brother George Melly captured for the Daily Mail newspaper; the book does contain 10 black and white re-printed drawings from the original Daily Mail strip of 1960 which George Melly did concurrently while the movie was being shot; the cartoon strip appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper during the filming period. The chapter in the book I, Flook encapsulates the complete original strip into twelve pages of narrative and drawings in which one of the drawings contains vampires including a female vampire standing in a line at the studio canteen.

Melly played Tony Hancock's girlfriend in two series of the Hancock's Half Hour (1955–56) radio series replacing Moira Lister. From 1967 to 1976, she was a regular panellist in the BBC radio comedy Just a Minute. Along with Sheila Hancock, she was one of the most regular female contestants, appearing in fifty-four episodes between 1967 and 1976.[10] In 1972, she chaired an episode.[11] She was the first panellist to win points for talking for the prescribed 60 seconds without hesitation, repetition or deviation. She also appeared in several episodes of The Benny Hill Show.

One of her two brothers, George Melly, was a jazz singer. She latterly lived in Ibiza with her husband Oscar Quitak. The marriage produced two children.

With the death of Bill Kerr in 2014, Melly was the last surviving regular cast member of Hancock's Half Hour. Melly died on 31 January 2020 at the age of 87.[12] Her husband survived her.