Joyce Grenfell



Joyce Irene Grenfell (née Phipps) (10 February 1910 – 30 November 1979) was an English film and television actress and comedienne.

Quotes

 * Stately as a galleon, I sail across the floor, Doing the military two-step, as in the days of yore.
 * Stately as a Galleon (1978), "Stately as a Galleon"


 * They look quite promising in the shop, and not entirely without hope when I get them back into my wardrobe. But then, when I put them on they tend to deteriorate with a very strange rapidity and one feels sorry for them.
 * Stately as a Galleon (1978), "English Lit." (of new clothes)


 * Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as chaos.
 * Stately as a Galleon (1978), "English Lit."


 * If I should go before the rest of you, Break not a flower, nor inscribe a stone, Nor, when I’m gone, speak in a Sunday voice, But be the usual selves That I have known.
 * Poem If I should go before the rest of you


 * I don't understand Ethel. I don't, I don't really. She's one of my very best friends, Just about the best, nearly. She's an awfully nice girl, Ethel is, Dainty and refined, I mean she'd never do or say Anything unkind. But get her inside a stadium And she seems to go out of her mind.
 * Poem Ethel


 * I was allowed to slave for them For ever and evermore. Oh, I was allowed to fetch and carry For my Three Brothers, Jim and Bob and Harry.
 * Poem Three Brothers


 * George - don't do that.
 * Catch phrase, used as the title of a book collecting her monologues, George - Don't Do That (1977)

About Grenfell

 * Nobody is safe. Deviate by a hair's-breadth from normal behaviour in her presence and you become a specimen in her collection. She has the ear to record every nuance of vour talk and the tongue to reproduce it.
 * W.A. Darlington "A Dangerous Woman but Company", The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post (London, 24 March 1965), p. 18
 * From a review of her one-woman show at the Queen's Theatre.