Prestwich: Play School star and Carry On actress Julie Stevens dies

The youngsters’s TV presenter, from Prestwich, who was recognized with Parkinson’s illness in 2019, died on Thursday, December 5.

In an announcement to the PA information company, her daughter, the radio presenter and podcast host Rachel New, mentioned: “Julie Stevens shall be remembered for her joyful spirit, her capacity to make each youngster really feel seen, and her lasting legacy on the earth of youngsters’s tv.”

Born on December 20, 1936, in Prestwich, Stevens profitable a expertise contest aged 20 led to a contract with the previous broadcaster ABC Tv Restricted.

She joined the forged of spy sequence The Avengers in 1962 as nightclub singer Venus Smith, who would assist Patrick Macnee’s character John Steed in his missions, earlier than picked to play Gloria in Sixties comedy movie Carry On Cleo.

In 1964, her daughter mentioned she was closely pregnant together with her first youngster Daniel when she auditioned for kids’s programme Play Faculty.

The favored youngsters’s programme made its debut on BBC Two’s launch on April 21, 1964, and ran for twenty-four years, till March 1988.

It formed the childhood of thousands and thousands and catapulted lots of its presenters to fame, together with Rick Jones, Brian Cant, Johnny Ball, Toni Arthur, Floella Benjamin, a presenter, actress and author and now a Liberal Democrat peer.

Stevens was additionally identified for comedy exhibits Ladies About City and Cabbages And Kings in addition to Play Away, a sequence for older youngsters, and appeared on Holby Metropolis.

She labored for a spell as Welsh comic and Oliver! actor Sir Harry Secombe’s private assistant after which supervisor, and lived between Provence, France and London for a time.

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She was married to presenter John White, whom she divorced in 1974, and actor and theatre director Michael Hucks, who she was married to from 1980 till 2001.

In 2016, she moved again to the UK to be close to her daughter, who mentioned “the previous couple of years had been troublesome for Julie, however she confronted it as she did all challenges, with good humour and nice appeal”.

Ms New added: “She leaves behind her two youngsters, 4 grandchildren, three nice grandchildren.”