VERA FRANCES, ACTRESS WHO GAVE WINNING TURNS IN WARTIME FILMS ALONGSIDE COMEDY GREATS OF THE ERA
Vera Frances, the actress, who has died aged 95, was a talented, no-nonsense, hard-voiced Cockney kid who enjoyed a variety of supporting roles in several comedies throughout the Second World War, appearing alongside comic giants including Arthur Askey, Tommy Handley and George Formby.
She made her film debut in Herbert Mason’s comedy-mystery Back-Room Boy (1942), starring Arthur Askey, and won a string of good reviews. “Back-Room Boy was my first and my favourite film,” she said in 2008. “Without hesitation Arthur Askey was my favourite co-star. I remember we laughed a lot.”
Askey was so impressed that he insisted that she star with him again in his next feature, King Arthur Was a Gentleman (1942). Her career was short-lived, however, and by the end of the decade she had withdrawn from view. Critics and audiences alike mourned her decision to quit.
Films in Review’s founding editor F Maurice Speed observed that Vera Frances “outshone Googie Withers and comedians Marriott and Moffat with ease in Back-Room Boy; rarely has there been such conviction, likeability and talent in a debut performance”.
She was born Vera Frances Still on September 29 1930 in Dagenham; her father was a props and special-effects man for Gainsborough Pictures at their Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd’s Bush.
In 1942, he overheard a conversation in the studio canteen between producers looking to find a confident young teenager for the studio’s next production, Back-Room Boy. The next day he turned up at work with Vera in tow; by teatime she had been signed up. Vera was an instant hit with Gainsborough’s money men, able to swap her polite, cultured voice for that of know-it-all Jane, the 13-year-old Cockney stowaway who berates Arthur Askey during his tenure as a weatherman stuck on a remote lighthouse.
The critic John Howard Reid wrote: “Vera Frances’s performance is stand-out and something you’ll never forget.”
Vera’s parents thought it beneficial not to have their daughter tied down to any one studio; instead, so she could complete her schooling, they arranged to have her contracted for single films rather than a general contract.
She rejoined Arthur Askey for her second film, the propaganda comedy King Arthur Was a Gentleman, co-starring Evelyn Dall, then played young Daisy in It’s That Man Again (1943), starring Tommy Handley and based on his hit radio show of that name.
The format of ITMA did not transfer well to the screen, but the radio show continued as a mainstay of the BBC schedule until Handley’s sudden death in 1949. Vera Frances was one of the 10,000 mourners at his funeral.
Her fourth feature, Get Cracking (1943), starred another of Britain’s favourite comics, George Formby, who gets into all manner of escapades as a corporal in the Home Guard in what could be described as a forerunner of Dad’s Army. She played an evacuee who builds a tank with the hapless hero, who as a result is promoted to sergeant.
Sidney Gilliat’s Waterloo Road (1945), depicting south London families experiencing adultery and tragedy during the Blitz, marked Vera Frances’s first non-comedy dramatic role. She played the little sister of John Mills’s soldier Jim, who goes AWOL to come home and keep his wife from the clutches of Stewart Granger’s conscription-dodging Romeo.
As Vera matured, the film offers became fewer – by her own admission she was a character actress rather than a great screen beauty – and she decided to retire from acting and focus on her first love, dance. After training at the Royal Academy of Dance, she opened a school in Ealing in 1947.
Her final screen outing was in 1948 playing Edie, the younger sister of Jean Kent’s juvenile delinquent Gwen, in the noirish melodrama Good-Time Girl.
In 1953, she married Dennis William-Ward, settled in Cambridgeshire and moved her dance school to March, where six decades later, in her eighties, Vera Frances still presided over daily classes, mostly with seniors, while her daughter Lynda Ward-Cray worked with younger groups.
Vera Frances’s grandson Iain Ward continued in the family footsteps as an actor, as well as teaching drama classes at the school. Dennis died in 2000, and she is survived by their daughter.
Vera Frances, born September 29 1930, died January 7 2026
2026-02-10T18:10:44Z