PASSINGS

Mollie Sugden

British comedy actress

Mollie Sugden, 86, a British actress best known for her role as Mrs. Slocombe in the television comedy series “Are You Being Served?” died Wednesday in London after a long illness, according to her agent, Joan Reddin.

With her hair highly coiffed and dyed various outlandish shades, Sugden played the bossy Mrs. Slocombe throughout the run of the innuendo-laden BBC show from 1972 to 1985.

Reruns of the show in the United States in the 1990s gained her a new audience overseas.

“She was great fun, a very good actress, very versatile. She could play serious stuff and comedy,” Frank Thornton, who played opposite Sugden in the series as the stuffy floorwalker Captain Peacock, told BBC television. “It was a very happy show to work on -- you can’t play comedy with people you dislike.”

Sugden also found success in the BBC TV comedy series “The Liver Birds” and in the long-running ITV soap opera “Coronation Street.”

In 1993 she had a small speaking part in San Francisco Opera’s production of Donizetti’s “Daughter of the Regiment.”

Mary Isobel Sugden was born July 21, 1922, in Keighley, England. Her education was interrupted by World War II, when she went to work in a munitions factory. She later studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Mary Lou Forbes

Desegregation stories won prize

Mary Lou Forbes, 83, a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 at the Washington Star for her coverage of school desegregation in Virginia and became founding editor of the Washington Times’ Commentary opinion page, died June 27 of breast cancer at Inova Alexandria (Va.) Hospital.

Forbes began her career at the Star as a 17-year-old copy messenger. Rapidly promoted to reporter, she made her greatest impact during the 1950s reporting on “massive resistance” in Virginia to desegregation in public schools. The resistance, pushed by the political machine of then-U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., aimed to shut down public schools rather than integrate.

Mary Lou Werner was born June 21, 1926, in Alexandria and raised by her widowed mother. After graduating from high school in 1942, she began studying math at the University of Maryland, but her family’s finances led her to quit school and seek employment.

She initially applied for a job in the Star’s accounting department, but the job was taken and she was directed to the newsroom. She said she thrived there, as long as editors did not think she was married or planning to have children.

In the late 1950s, she became one of the paper’s first female editors. When she was hired, she recalled, the newsroom’s top executive asked her, “Do you think that men will take orders from you?”

The Star, an afternoon paper, folded in 1981, and three years later Forbes joined the fledgling Washington Times. She started the Commentary section, which features opinion writing distinct from the op-ed page.

Godfrey Rampling

Runner won Olympic gold

Godfrey Rampling, 100, who was believed to be Britain’s oldest Olympian and who won gold in the 4x400-meter relay at the 1936 Berlin Games, died in his sleep June 20 at a nursing home in Bushey, England.

He was the father of actress Charlotte Rampling.

The Olympian ran the second leg of the 1936 relay with teammates Fred Wolff, Bill Roberts and Arthur Brown, beating the U.S. and German teams.

At the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Rampling had been on the British team that took the silver medal in the 4x400 relay.

The British runners’ preparation was fairly lackadaisical.

“Training was a complete farce,” Rampling told the Independent newspaper in 1996. “. . . When I felt like it, I ran round [a cricket ground] or sprinted up and down in short bursts. Then I would run for about 600 yards for so-called stamina training. The Americans were astounded at our lack of training.”

Rampling was born in Blackheath, southeast of London, on May 14, 1909, and spent 29 years in the British army’s Royal Artillery, retiring with the rank of colonel in 1958.

Jan Rubes, a Czech character actor and opera singer who played the Amish grandfather in the 1985 film “Witness,” died Monday at Toronto General Hospital after suffering a stroke. Rubes, who immigrated to Canada in 1948, was 89.

-- times staff and wire reports

news.obits@latimes.com