Actress Miriam Karlin, best known for playing Paddy in TV comedy The Rag Trade, has died at the age of 85.
Karlin had been suffering with cancer.
Though best known for her work on The Rag Trade and her inauspicious end in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Karlin was a seasoned stage performer who was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company during the 1970s and who played Golde in the original West End production of Fiddler On The Roof.
Born Miriam Samuels and raised in Hampstead, she studied at RADA before serving in the Entertainments National Service Association during the Second World War. Having made her London stage debut in the Lyric Hammersmith production of The Time Of Your Life in 1946, she went on to star in shows including The Diary Of Anne Frank, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be and Henry IV Parts I and II.
A vociferous political activist as well as performer, Karlin continued working into her 80s, appearing in films including Children Of Men and Flashbacks Of A Fool.
MA