Tessie O’Shea

Genuinely, one of the greatest joys of writing this column is throwing someone on the schedule because I happen to be watching something they’re in and say, “Yeah, I should get to them” and discovering they’re fascinating. I had actually scheduled someone for today who I’d already covered, due to some rearranging to fill a theme, and happened to be watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the time—because some days, you just need to see Nazis get defeated by a witch—and thought, “Huh, I never have gotten to that woman who plays the postmistress, have I? She’s in two movies I like; I bet I could get five paragraphs about her.”

That’s the standard, you see. Five paragraphs. I was trained in the five-paragraph essay, and Tessie O’Shea seemed to fit a five-paragraph standard. And oh, boy, does she. Teresa Mary O’Shea of Cardiff, came up in the British music hall tradition, and that’s not something we talk about enough here. O’Shea was on stage by the age of six. Wikipedia says she once got lost on a family vacation and her mom found her because she was performing. Some people are just born to it, it seems, and O’Shea was one of them.

Something I like about her is that she leaned into the fact that she was not exactly slender. Her theme song as she grew older became “Two Ton Tessie From Tennessee.” On The Ed Sullivan Show, she referred to Twiggy, acknowledging that the pair were physical opposites. But she had talent, and she used it, and who cared if she wasn’t petite? You weren’t watching her because of how she looked, you were watching her because of how she performed.

And that Ed Sullivan performance? Her second one was on February 9, 1964. She was not the only British performer on the episode. There were four boys on it from somewhere over a hundred miles away from Cardiff, from Liverpool. So no, no one talks about her on it, but still. We do not remember how bonkers any given episode’s list of performers was, and boy her four appearances are examples of that. She appeared with not just the Beatles but Robert Goulet, Buster Keaton, Sir Alec Guinness, and the Temptations. It’s amazing.

And, yes, her movie career. Mrs. Hobday in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Alice Foss in The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! And honestly that’s about it. She was more a stage performer, and a recording artist, and about eight billion variety shows when those were things you’d get on TV. But while she’s not a huge movie star, those two minor roles in those two movies are enough to get you to look into her and discover one of the greats of the music hall stage, and maybe that’s worthwhile by itself.