Early years Born in
Montpelier Square,
Knightsbridge, London, Grenfell was the daughter of an American socialite, Nora Langhorne, one of five daughters of
Chiswell Langhorne, (an American railway millionaire), and of the architect Paul Phipps, the grandson of
Charles Paul Phipps and a second cousin of the
diseuse Ruth Draper, in whose professional footsteps she followed. The Phipps family were wealthy clothiers, whose success allowed them to join the gentry of their native Wiltshire.
Nancy Astor was one of her maternal aunts; and lived in a cottage on the estate, a mile from the main house, in the early years of her marriage. Joyce Phipps had an upper middle-class London childhood. Among her friends was
Virginia Graham, with whom she kept up a lifelong correspondence, and who wrote Grenfell's biography in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Grenfell attended the
Francis Holland School in central London, and the
Claremont Fan Court School, in
Esher, Surrey. She then went to a
finishing school in Paris at the age of 17. After this she enrolled at the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, but found the hard work of learning the craft of acting less glamorous than she had imagined and left after a single term. She supposed at the time that this "was the finish of my dreams of becoming an actress". In 1927 she had met Reginald Pascoe Grenfell (1903–1993), a mining executive and later a lieutenant-colonel in the
King's Royal Rifle Corps. They were married two years later, on 12 December 1929 at
St Margaret's, Westminster, and remained together until her death nearly 50 years later. They were unable to have children of their own.
Early career In the late 1930s Grenfell contributed verses to
Punch and helped to entertain her aunt's guests at Cliveden. After one lunch,
J. L. Garvin, the editor of
The Observer, engaged her as the paper's first radio critic. At an informal supper given by the
BBC producer
Stephen Potter in January 1939, she agreed to his request to entertain her fellow guests with a monologue of her own devising. This was "Useful and Acceptable Gifts", in which she played a gauche lecturer at a meeting of the
Women's Institute. The impresario
Herbert Farjeon was among the guests and he invited her to perform the piece in his forthcoming
revue at the
Little Theatre, London.
The Tatler found her two monologues "quite the best items in the programme".
The Sketch devoted a full page to photographs of her in her different characters.
The Bystander thought that Grenfell challenged the celebrated Ruth Draper "on her own pitch ... carry[ing] off the acting honours of this gay and intelligent entertainment." During the
Second World War Grenfell wrote for and appeared in three more
West End revues:
Diversion and
Diversion No. 2 at
Wyndham's Theatre in 1940 and 1941, and
Light and Shade at the
Ambassadors in 1942. In early 1942 she met the composer
Richard Addinsell. Together they wrote many successful songs including "I'm Going to See You Today" and "Turn Back the Clock", which, in the words of the biographer Janie Hampton, "aptly caught the public mood". For BBC radio, together with Potter, she wrote and starred in an occasional radio series called
How to …, which ran intermittently from 1943 until 1962 offering humorous advice on how (and how not) to do things. In 1943 she made her only attempt at acting in a stage play: she resigned from the cast of a West End production of the American comedy
Junior Miss after the first three days of rehearsal, finding that onstage she could only perform looking straight at an audience, and could not "act sideways", although she found some film acting roles "fun to do". In the later years of the war Grenfell toured in the UK for
ENSA, sometimes with Addinsell accompanying her at the piano. In late 1943 the head of ENSA,
Basil Dean, invited the two to tour troop camps and hospitals in North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. Addinsell's health was too fragile to permit him to accept, and Grenfell recruited
Viola Tunnard, later better known as a close colleague of
Benjamin Britten. In 1944 and 1945 they performed in Algeria, Malta, Sicily, Italy, Iran, Iraq, India and Egypt. Coward had been a family friend since Grenfell was a girl. At first he had viewed her transition from amateur to professional with some doubt. Within a few years he had come to recognise her professionalism, her skill as a performer ("good in all she does on the stage") and the quality of her monologues, even if "she shouldn't write lyrics." In addition to her own two numbers, she sang Coward's comic catalogue of domestic disasters "That is the End of the News", "disguised as a schoolgirl with pigtails, all my make-up off, a shiny face and a terrible grin." After the 1947 revue
Tuppence Coloured, Grenfell developed new sketches including the first of her six Nursery School monologues, with the harassed teacher's recurring cry to one of her unseen charges, "George – don't do that...." In the 1951 revue
Penny Plain she performed her "Joyful Noise" (music by
Donald Swann), a parody of an amateur choir ("And some of us cannot sing much, And some can't sing at all, But how we love our outings to the Royal Albert Hall"). After this, Grenfell and Tunnard made another tour entertaining British troops in North Africa.
Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure (1954) was her first more or less solo West End show (there were three dancers providing interludes between Grenfell's numbers).
The Stage commented that any doubts that Grenfell could sustain a solo evening were quickly dispelled: After two provincial tours and a year in London she took the show to
Broadway, where it had a sell-out eight-week run. , 1972|alt=slim white woman of mature years seated by a table that is covered with flowers During the 1950s and 1960s Grenfell appeared in several film roles including "Lovely Ducks", the shooting gallery attendant in
Stage Fright (1950), Miss Gossage in
The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), Police Sergeant Ruby Gates in the
St Trinian's series, Mrs Barham in
The Americanization of Emily and Hortense Astor in
The Yellow Rolls-Royce. The rest of Grenfell's stage career was in a series of solo shows in London and on tour. Between 1957 and 1970 she gave her show
Joyce Grenfell in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States, as well as around Britain and in the West End. Her last live performance was at
Windsor Castle for the Queen's Waterloo Dinner in 1973.
Last years and legacy Soon after the Windsor Castle show Grenfell was taken ill with an eye condition, which was subsequently diagnosed as cancer. As a convinced
Christian Scientist (like her aunt Nancy), she was averse to doctors and hospitals. Her husband did not share her beliefs and prevailed on her to undergo treatment. Grenfell was appointed an
Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1946 for her war work. It was confirmed after her death that she was to have been made a Dame Commander (DBE) in the 1980 New Year Honours List. In 1998, the
Royal Mail memorialised Grenfell with her image on a
postage stamp as part of a series of stamps celebrating five comedians, drawn by
Gerald Scarfe. Grenfell's widower, Reggie Grenfell, died at their home at 34 Elm Park Gardens,
Chelsea, London, on 31 March 1993, aged 89. A
blue plaque is on the wall stating that Joyce Grenfell lived in Flat 8 from 1957 to 1979. In 2002 her friend
Janie Hampton published a biography,
Joyce Grenfell.
Maureen Lipman toured with the one-woman show
Re: Joyce!, which she co-wrote with
James Roose-Evans. In it she recreates some of Grenfell's best-known sketches. Lipman also presented the radio programme
Choice Grenfell, compiled from Grenfell's writings. Roose-Evans also edited
Darling Ma, a 1997 collection of Grenfell's letters to her mother. ==Stage performances==