Joan Young

Joan Young (born Joan Cecilia Frances Wragge; 1 February 1900 – 9 October 1984) was a British character actress of stage, screen and radio, perhaps best known for her portrayal of Lady Chesapeake in Big Bad Mouse and for the wartime radio series, Navy Mixture. She also appeared in several films and TV productions.

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 1 February 1900 (and, purportedly, relocated three weeks later), Young was the daughter of music hall performers Nellie Blanche C. (née Parker) and Charles Alfred Romaine Wragg, known professionally as Charles Pastor.). Speaking with reporter Beverly Howells almost eight decades later, Young acknowledged that, given her parents' continued performing, it was "really my grandmother who provided any motherly care I received as a child." She was educated at convents in Bournemouth and in France.

In April 1915, the then 15-year-old Young—as Joan Wragge—appeared in A Crown of Sorrows, a 5-act play set in Elizabethan era Scotland and staged at Bournemouth's St. Peter's Hall to benefit Belgian refugees. Alongside a generous sampling of that era's British royalty, the play featured Wragge as "Jamie, court jester at Holyrood".

On Tuesday 22 September 1936, the BBC aired Young's "satirical revue" entitled Fictional Fame on Parade (with music by Nene Smith), featuring a cast including, among others, Young, Edward Cooper, Marie Dainton, and the BBC Variety Orchestra, conducted by Charles Shadwell.

In 1938, Young was cast in radio adaptations of two well-known British novels: P. G. Wodehouse's Sam the Sudden (adapted by Jack Inglis as Semi-Detached), and, in serialized form, Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, broadcast on 12 consecutive Sundays, beginning on 15 October. In December, an original radio drama penned by Leslie Stokes, The Snowman, starred Holland Bennett, Alec Guinness, Betty Jardine, Mary Merrall, Joan Young, Ernest Jay, and G. R. Schjelderup.

Reviewing the 1961 revival of Shaw's Heartbreak House staged at Wyndham's Theatre, Stage and Television Today's R. B. Marriott rated Young's performance the "best Nurse Guiness I have seen". The following year, Young—as aggrieved in-law Garnet Hadfield—went head to head with Laurence Olivier's Fred Midway in the London production of David Turner's Semi-Detached.

Amidst a generally mixed review of "The Room", a season 1 episode of James MacTaggart's 1964 series, Teletale, Stage and Television Today critic Marjorie Morris makes note of the frustrating dilemma posed by the episode's seemingly saving grace being all but negated by its miserly deployment.

Joan Young gave a powerful performance as Madame Darbedat. It was really too good, because I wanted to see more of her and felt cheated when I didn't.

In 1980, the 80-year-old Young amassed two notable credits to round out a six-decade-plus career; first, by once again reprising her Big Bad Mouse role alongside fellow first-nighters Jimmy Edwards and Eric Sykes, and, finally, by appearing in two consecutive episodes of the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small, as Miss Westerman, an elderly dog owner, who is concerned about the well-being and whereabouts of her ailing companion, misplaced prior to critical surgery by the putative caregivers.

In the summer of 1923, in Chorlton, Lancashire, the 23-year-old Wragge married journalist John Young. Their marriage produced one child, daughter April Young, a London-based agent whose clients include June Whitfield, Joe Gladwin, John Blythe as well as Young herself, and her Bad Mouse co-star Jimmy Edwards,

Following a short illness, Young died on 9 October 1984 at the Royal Masonic Hospital in Hammersmith, London, aged 84. She was survived by her husband and daughter.