Felicity Kendal

Felicity Ann Kendal was born in Olton, Warwickshire, England, in 1946. She is the younger daughter of Laura Liddell and actor and manager Geoffrey Kendal. Her older sister, Jennifer Kendal, was also an actress.

After early years in Birmingham, Kendal lived in India with her family from the age of seven: her father was an English actor-manager who led his own repertory company on tours of India. The ensemble would perform plays from a repertoire including Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan to audiences that included schoolchildren, nuns, British expatriates, and royalty. As the family travelled, Kendal attended six different Loreto College convent schools in India, until the age of 13. She contracted typhoid fever in Calcutta at the age of 17.

Kendal made her stage debut for her family's company aged nine months, when she was carried on stage as a changeling boy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Five years later she was the Changeling in the same play, and aged nine she was Macduff's son in a production of Macbeth. Her first speaking role was as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream when she was 12.

Kendal's family and their touring theatre company were the inspiration for the Merchant Ivory Productions film Shakespeare Wallah (1965), which follows the story of nomadic British actors as they perform Shakespeare plays in towns in post-colonial India. She played Lizzie Buckingham, the daughter of the company's actor-managers, who falls in love with the son of film star Manjula, portrayed by Madhur Jaffrey. Lizzie's parents face a dilemma between their deep-seated theatrical ambitions and their fears for the welfare of their daughter. The Observer film critic Kenneth Tynan wrote a positive review of the film, and considered that the role of the daughter was "fetchingly played by the dumpling-faced Felicity Kendal". Patrick Gibbs of The Daily Telegraph named Kendal as his actress of the year, and said that, that based on her portrayal of Ophelia in an extract from Hamlet within the film, her performance of that role would "rank with any that [he had] seen".

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph journalist Jasper Rees in 2006, Kendal said that her time in India was "sometimes very hard, sometimes very poor, sometimes ghastly, ghastly, ghastly in all sorts of ways", she did not regret it, and that it was an "amazing way of living". She also felt that it prepared her for a career in theatre as she did not have any established expectations about how things should be. Aged 17, she moved to England, initially living with her aunt.

Kendal appeared in two episodes of Love Story in 1966, and as a teenage hippie in "The May Fly and the Frog", an episode of The Wednesday Play which starred John Gielgud, the same year. Her other early TV roles included parts in Man in a Suitcase (1967), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1968–69), The Woodlanders (1970) and Jason King (1972).

In 1975, she appeared as Princess Vicky in Edward the Seventh. In his article about Kendal for the Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television, David Pickering wrote that in the early years of Kendal's television career, "Producers liked her girlish good looks and bubbly confidence and audiences also quickly warmed to her."