Paula Wilcox has spent fifty years being the woman at the table who says what everyone else is thinking, and making it sound almost kind. She is at her best in company; put her in a good ensemble and she will quietly run it.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Lilian in The Smoking Room (2004) pass judgment on a colleague who has just stepped out. The words are harsh and the face around them is doing something else: a small smile of regret, as if she wished it were not so, which fools nobody at the table and is not meant to. That is Wilcox's trick, and it has been her trick for a long time. She plays outspoken women without playing them loud, so the sharpness arrives a beat after the smile does.
The career started fast. She joined the National Youth Theatre at 17, had her first television role in 1969, and within a year was leading Jack Rosenthal's The Lovers (1970), two series and a film, as Beryl Battersby opposite Richard Beckinsale. Man About the House (1973–76) followed, with Wilcox as Chrissy Plummer sharing a flat with Richard O'Sullivan, and it is still the part most people know her for. The interesting thing is what came after: Miss Jones and Son, The Queen's Nose, then decades of ensemble comedy in Boomers (2014) and Upstart Crow (2016), soap work in Emmerdale and a three-year run in Coronation Street (2020–23) as Elaine Jones, on a street she had first appeared in back in 1969. On stage there has been Shirley Valentine and Driving Miss Daisy. She has never been out of work for long and never been fashionable, which is usually the better bargain.
In The Smoking Room she is the elder of a cast that includes Robert Webb and Siobhan Redmond, and we thought that cast better than the reviews at the time allowed, even if the series itself only just clears the bar. We liked Lilian more than we liked the programme around her. Webb's Robin mutters his jokes into his chest and Redmond's Sharon can end a conversation by picking up her lighter, but it was Wilcox we found ourselves waiting for, because every verdict came wrapped in that apology and we felt slightly complicit each time we laughed. The gossip is the engine of the show and she is the one who keeps it turning.
The reputation is almost uniformly kind, and the only reservation anyone raises is that she is a character actor rather than a leading one, stronger in the nuanced supporting part than in the big dramatic lead. On the evidence we have, we would not argue with that, and we do not think it is much of a criticism. Most sitcoms die for want of someone who can make a cruel line land gently. She has said she would still like to work with the RSC or the National. Whoever gets her next should do the obvious thing and put her at a table with seven other people.
Biography
Paula Wilcox is an English actress born on 13 December 1949 in Manchester. She joined the National Youth Theatre at the age of seventeen and began her television career in 1969.
She is known for her role as Chrissy Plummer in the sitcom Man About the House (1973–1976) and as Beryl Battersby in The Lovers (1970–1971). Later credits include Lilian in The Smoking Room (2004–2005), Sandra Ross in Trying (2020–2022), Mary Arden in Upstart Crow (2016–2018) and Elaine Jones in Coronation Street (2020–2023). She has also appeared in Emmerdale, Mount Pleasant, Boomers, Scoop (2006) and The Cleaner.
