LONDON (NY TIMES) - Una Stubbs, the veteran British actress best known to American audiences for her role as Mrs Hudson, the landlady to Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series Sherlock, died last Thursday (Aug 12) at her home in Edinburgh, Scotland. She was 84.
Her death was confirmed by her agent, Ms Rebecca Blond.
Stubbs was a recognisable face in Britain, where she had appeared in comedic and dramatic roles onstage, on screen and on television for more than half a century, including in the long-running soap opera EastEnders (1985 to present) and the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (1965 to 1975).
Overseas television viewers knew her best as Mrs Hudson, the motherly landlady to Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock. The show, which aired from 2010 to 2017, was an international hit, and Stubbs turned Mrs Hudson into a fan favourite by making the character a cheerful foil for the show's darker themes.
The landlady was a bit of a phantom in Arthur Conan Doyle's famous stories about Holmes, on which the show was based. So Stubbs and the show's creators built Mrs Hudson into a comedic parental figure with a checkered past.
"I am the mother of three sons, so I thought that would be a good angle to go on," Stubbs told The New York Times in 2016. "I once told Benedict that my sons go straight to the fridge and make themselves sandwiches, and he did that in one episode."
She added that the creators of Sherlock, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, "have made me more saucy now, and a bit grubby, which I enjoy".
Gatiss echoed that statement when he said of Stubbs on Twitter last Thursday that "mischief was in her blood".
"We were so blessed that she became our imperishable Mrs. Hudson," Gatiss said.
Una Stubbs was born May 1, 1937, in Welwyn Garden City, England, north of London, the second of three children of Angela and Clarence Stubbs. Her breakout role was in the 1963 film Summer Holiday, a musical starring Cliff Richard, as a singer in a travelling musical trio.
Her marriages to actors Peter Gilmore and Nicky Henson ended in divorce, and Stubbs raised her sons as a single mother. She told The Guardian that she spent most of her life "doing two jobs, motherhood and acting, and only being so-so at both of them".
"And now," she added, "I'm trying to do one job really well, with a bit of grannying thrown in."
