At 97, Thelma Ruby is both a marvel and a rarity

The veteran actress has not only enjoyed a career touching almost 80 years and featuring an enviable list of co-stars that reads like a Who’s Who directory, but remarkably she only just announced her retirement from stage and screen at the grand age of 97.

Or so we had all thought.

A beaming Thelma, whose wonderfully fresh complexion belies her real age, reveals during our Zoom chat that it may have been too early to close the curtains on her career just yet.

And what notable moments there have been in that career. She played Golde opposite Topol’s iconic Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and she’s trodden the boards with Judi Dench in Cabaret, Michael Hordern in King Lear and Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight. On screen she’s enjoyed stints in Dad’s Army and Coronation Street and only in recent weeks filmed a mockumentary alongside Kate Winslet.
Three months ago, the Leeds-born Jewish actress announced her one-woman show at The Pheasantry in West London would be her last, but it seems there might be an encore.

“I did announce it would be my last, but one of the people there said, ‘if you’re feeling as well as you do now just before your 100th birthday, I think you should take a theatre and say you will do your one-woman show.’ So, I can’t honestly say I’ve retired!”

Whether she’s formally taken a bow from acting or not, Thelma reveals she still finds herself being asked to regale endlessly interesting tales of a life spent in entertainment.

Her fans even include the newly-titled Queen Consort Camilla.

Only a few weeks ago, Thelma was invited by her broadcaster friend Giles Brandreth and actress Joanna Lumley to a special lunch they were hosting to mark Camilla’s 75th birthday. All the guests were “well-known people, all aged over 70, who have achieved something in their old age.”

She recalls of that special day suddenly finding herself the centre of attention. “Giles stood up and gave a speech. He said: ‘Just a few weeks ago, I saw a lady give the most phenomenal performance. She sang, she made us laugh, she made us cry. She’s 97, she’s here today and her name is Thelma Ruby!’ I was asked to stand up and the entire audience burst into applause.”

Thelma blushes again at the memory, letting slip she was not always someone who could bear the thought of being in the limelight. In fact, as a young child growing up in an Orthodox family in Leeds, Thelma Wigoder as she was known then, was painfully shy and never admitted to wanting to follow in the footsteps of her actress mother Paula.

A child performer who matured into a leading lady, Paula was “gorgeous and had a beautiful singing voice – which I never had,” says Thelma modestly.

Indeed, Thelma was likely destined to “do what my parents wished for me, which was to marry a nice Jewish doctor or lawyer from Leeds – or maybe even Manchester,” but history and fate had other ideas.

The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 resulted in Thelma, who was just a young teenager at the time, being evacuated to the United States with her mother. She subsequently landed a scholarship at Finch Junior College in New York.

She recalls: “They asked me what I wanted to major in and I said I wanted to be an actress – it was the first time I had said it out loud. I do believe if the war hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t have had the courage to become an actress.”

In 1944, Thelma returned to Britain with her newly-acquired education and she and Paula signed up to join ENSA.

“This stood for Entertainments National Service Association, but the troops used to call it, “Every Night Something Awful,” she laughs.

She travelled to hospitals all over the country to bring cheer to convalescing soldiers. She remembers “one whole audience of boys who had been blinded, another audience of boys who had lost limbs”. On VE Day, 8 May 1945, Thelma was asked to sing for young pilots who had “been shot down in flames” and suffered serious burns as a result. “Boys with no faces, no noses, no ears,” she tells me. “But what an audience they were for VE night. How they laughed, how they cheered!”

Thelma looks back at those early days of her career with as much fondness as her later successes, which include starring alongside Topol in a 1984 production of Fiddler On The Roof. She says of her co-star: “There are a lot of actors and actresses that other people warn you that won’t like, that they’re very difficult. And that’s what some people said about Topol. I can only say we became good friends and I loved working with him.”

She is equally admiring of Judy Dench, who she co-starred alongside in 1968 in Cabaret and remains a close friend to this day.

Thelma recalls: “There’s a part where I’m facing the audience and she has her back to the audience listening to me doing a monologue. Eight shows a week nobody could see her face, but there were real tears pouring down her cheeks. Her face was suffused in sympathy. I’d say there’s one test of good acting and that is if you know how to listen. She was also just such a lovely person – there wasn’t a stagehand, dresser or anyone who she didn’t know and care about.”

Another personal highlight of her career was meeting Israel’s first female Prime Minister, Golda Meir. She and her actor husband Peter Frye, who were married from 1970 until his death in 1991, adapted the play Momma Golda about the Premier’s life.

She says of visiting Golda Meir at her home: “If there hadn’t been a security man outside, you wouldn’t have known she was special. She lived in a simple bungalow and opened the door herself. She even made the tea! Golda, who was a known chain smoker, said to me: ‘I want you to do me a favour.’ I said of course, what is it Mrs Meir? She said, ‘I saw the original play, Golda, on Broadway and Anne Bancroft stooped. I don’t stoop!’ I told her, ‘I promise you I won’t stoop, but you are giving me another problem – I don’t smoke!’ We had a lovely afternoon together.”

Thelma’s eyes light up as she regales those happy moments – and that’s exactly how she talks about her years as an actress. She blesses the “good luck I’ve had all my life.”

She adds: “To have found such a happy career, to have found even at 45 a wonderful husband and have 21 wonderful years together and to be acting at the age of 97 – and still feel fine! I’ve been very lucky.”

While she and Peter did not have children, she is close to Peter’s daughter from a previous marriage, and through her enjoys 10 grandchildren and 47 great-grandchildren.

Is happiness key to a long life, I ask?

“Someone recently asked me this. I’ve never smoked, I’ve never been a drinker. I do try and let troubles slide off me and I don’t think I’ve ever lost my temper. Then they asked, ‘Are you Jewish?’ And I said yes! So maybe that’s the secret? It’s all in the genes, you know…”