The best bad girl in British films

And so farewell to the beautiful Miss Googie Withers, who despite a career that saw her work with such esteemed directors as Hitchcock, Powell & Pressburger and Charles Crichton, was most famous as the prison governor in ITV's wildly popular Within These Walls in the mid-70s.

Another source of camp interest in this lovely actress was of course her unusual name: her Bengali nurse as a child nicknamed her "Googie", which apparently means "Dove" in Punjabi. From The Scotsman:

Years later Withers was in a stage version of Mollie Keane's Time After Time with Sir John Gielgud. She plucked up courage to ask why he had never cast her. In that sonorous voice he dropped one of his almighty clangers: "Because you have such a stupid name."

Here she is, hamming it up (with Anna Massey and Julia McKenzie) in the TV adaptation of Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac:

And here, of course, is a taster of the gripping Within These Walls...

Googie Withers - Within These Walls

RIP

"Best British bad girl" - Googie Withers obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald

Googie Withers on IMDB