Kathy Staff spent thirty-five years being disgusted by Compo on the same doorstep and never once let it go stale. The battleaxe was a performance; the warmth underneath it was hers, and it is why Nora Batty outlasted the joke.
Fi1m perspective
A woman stands on her doorstep in curlers and wrinkled stockings with a broom in her hand, and Compo, from the pavement, tells her something admiring. She does not shriek and she does not smile. She lets it hang a beat, and then the broom comes up. Kathy Staff played that scene from the 1973 pilot of Last of the Summer Wine, where she had the first line, to her last appearance in August 2008, well over two hundred episodes. Most such turns wear out inside a series. Hers did not, and the reason is in the beat before the broom.
She came to it late and from the side: repertory, a decade away raising two daughters, extra work at Granada, then Castle Haven in 1969. 1973 brought Nora Batty and Vera Hopkins in Coronation Street. Roy Clarke then wrote her the same woman again as Mrs Blewett in Open All Hours, a customer who has decided the shop is in the wrong before she reaches the counter, opposite Ronnie Barker and David Jason. From 1978 she added Doris Luke in Crossroads, a kindly cleaner, and juggled the two for seven years, returning to Doris in 2001. She said of the pair: "I enjoyed myself as Nora Batty because I enjoyed the comedy, whereas Doris was more like me."
That gap between actor and part is the point of her. Off screen she was gentle and quietly dressed, and the producers on Summer Wine sometimes had to ask her to make Nora harder. What she gave them was a woman whose disapproval is a defence, who treats feeling as weakness and shows it only by accident, in a glance held a fraction too long after Bill Owen's Compo has gone. We have watched her shoo him off that step more times than we can count, and lately it has made us laugh and then unexpectedly sorry: the shooing is the closest thing to affection Nora will allow herself. Without that, Nora is a cartoon of a Northern battleaxe; with it, the cartoon has a pulse.
In the later series the routine could feel like a routine, Nora wheeled on to do the expected thing while the writing looked elsewhere. When Owen died in 1999 she carried on, alongside Peter Sallis, but the doorstep scenes had lost the man they were built around. Her film work is slight: an uncredited Mrs Oliphant in A Kind of Loving (1962), a cook in Mary Reilly (1996), parts that used the face and not the timing.
She had one instrument and one character to play it on, and for thirty-five years she let Nora become neither monster nor sweetheart. If you know her only as a set of curlers, watch the early series, with Owen on the pavement, and look at what she does before the broom moves.
Biography
Kathy Staff was an English actress. Born Minnie Higginbottom on 12 July 1928 in Dukinfield, Cheshire, she began her professional career in 1946 with touring repertory companies, initially using the stage name Katherine Brant. She married John Staff in 1951 and adopted his surname for her work.
She is best known for her role as Nora Batty in the BBC sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, which she played from the 1973 pilot until 2008. Other television credits include Mrs Blewett in Open All Hours and Doris Luke in Crossroads. Film appearances include an uncredited role in The War Game (1966), A Kind of Loving (1962) and The Dresser (1983). She also appeared in Coronation Street in multiple parts.
Staff died on 13 December 2008 in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, aged 80.
