My friend Wendy Phillips, who has died aged 81, was a school cleaner, a miner’s wife and an actor from Pontycymer, South Wales, where she lived all her adult life.
She was born a mile away, in the village of Blaengarw, the daughter of Llew Morgans, a coalminer, and his wife, Salina. Wendy attended Blaengarw girls’ school and took her first job at Goldblatts the chemist in Pontycymer.
A young man who had just returned from army service walked in one day and told her that he was going to marry her. He was seven years older and Wendy was not interested but he waited outside the shop every evening and four years later, in 1959, they were married.
Davey “Dagwood” Phillips and Wendy lived in the house he was born in, with their daughter, Carron. Davey was a miner at the Garw Colliery and Wendy a cleaner at Cwm Garw school. During the miners’ strike, Wendy was instrumental in organising and collecting food and clothes parcels to distribute to families in her community. I met her in her later years, through the writer Molly Parkin, who was born in Pontycymer.
Wendy and I made seven films together inspired by stories she told in her kitchen and all set in the village, starting with Up the Valley in 1995. She was John Wayne to my John Ford. Her formidable presence, outstanding humour and impeccable timing put Wendy in a spotlight she never expected nor asked for.
We went to Hollywood to make Valley Girls (1996), in which Wendy acted alongside Shelley Winters, Rosanna Arquette and Ray Gravell, and she would go on to appear with Spike Milligan, Jim Cartwright, Lionel Bart and Benjamin Zephaniah in The Village (1996), Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel in Mad Cows (1999), and Rachel Griffiths, Matthew Rhys, Jonathan Pryce and Ioan Gruffudd in Very Annie Mary (2001).
While we were filming Valley Girls in Los Angeles, Wendy and Dagwood were taken to Spago’s restaurant. Wendy ordered chips and fried egg, and the chef Wolfgang Puck came out of the kitchen and served her himself. Dagwood stood up and sang The Red Flag, the entire dining room broke into applause, and they were sent over a bottle of champagne – but Wendy and Dagwood were content in Pontycymer.
She had to hire a London press agent to bat away the hundreds of requests for interviews with “the cleaning lady who went to Hollywood”.
She told the Guardian in 1996: “I haven’t been able to leave the house for two days.” A Japanese news crew managed to land in her front garden in a helicopter and Hello! magazine got a double-page feature, the Telegraph published her film-making diaries and she featured in magazines and TV shows worldwide. She was once the answer to a question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
An American television journalist asked Wendy: “What’s the difference between making movies and cleaning the school?” “Well … ,” she said. “When I clean the school I pick up all the chairs, I stack ’em on the tables, I sweep the floors, I polish the floors, I clean all the blackboards and I clean the lavvies ... And filming’s just bloody boring!”
Dagwood died in 2002. Wendy is survived by Carron, her granddaughters, Hayley and Kirsty, and a great-grandson, Louie.
