The mini-skirted Marina in Last of the Summer Wine could show only a fraction of the depth and range of Jean Fergusson, who played her for 25 years.
Fortnightly rep was still going strong in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, in the 1970s when I first saw her. With 15 to 20 productions a year it provided a fabulous theatre grounding for young actors and fledgling critics alike.
Jean, still in her 20s, made an unforgettable impression on me as the middle-aged Hester Collyer in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, suicidal after leaving her husband, a judge, for a young pilot too restless for the steadiness of peacetime life.
She was also outstanding in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance as Claire, the witty and hard-drinking sister living with “civilised” (read emotionally repressed) Agnes and Agnes’s husband Tobias, who may or may not have had an affair with Claire.
Much later I would enjoy her as Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals at West Yorkshire Playhouse and – by now lodging in the London flat she owned – I was able to advise her a little on the script for her one-woman show about Hylda Baker, She Knows, You Know!
She didn’t have many laughs in the Rattigan, but in all the rest, including Last of the Summer Wine (itself a kind of rep company), she would play the comedy while indicating the deep loneliness in these single women locked in worlds where everyone was expected to aspire to marital harmony.
Paul Allen
Two decades ago Rotherham Civic theatre celebrated its refurbishment with a gala review. During the interval at the bar I got into conversation with a woman about what we had seen so far.
When I remarked that she looked familiar, she told me that she was in Last of the Summer Wine, and that her partner, Paul Jenkinson, had been the architect on the project.
All I could say was: “Oh, Marina.”
Iain St John
