Marti Webb
Early life and education[edit]
Marti Webb was born in Cricklewood in 1944.[2][3] Her parents took her to variety shows and pantomimes as a child.[4] Her father played the violin and her mother sang and played the piano.[5] She attended dance lessons from the age of 3 and first performed in public at the age of 7, at the Scala Theatre, London, initially hoping to be a ballerina.[6][7]
After a school teacher suggested to her parents that her natural talent for singing and dancing should be nurtured, she was educated at the Aida Foster stage school from the age of 12, where she eventually became Head Girl.[5][6][8] Her mother had to take an additional job to order to pay for the school fees. While training, she appeared in BBC Schools programmes.[9] Webb later commented that, having come from a normal school, she found it a shock to be asked to perform in front of her classmates.
The first musical she saw was Lionel Bart's Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be as some of her fellow students were performing in it.[4] The school would send students for auditions regularly, which led to an audition for the original London production of Bye Bye Birdie, although she wasn't offered a role.[4] She also auditioned for Oscar Hammerstein II for The Sound of Music, but being overcome by shyness, spoke very quietly and wasn't cast in the show.
She was selected to take part in the television programme Carol Levis' Junior Discoveries, which was broadcast from the Hackney Empire, for which she sang "Musetta's Waltz" from La Boheme.[6]
Personal life[edit]
Webb married three times and does not have any children. She was married to the actor Alexander Balfour in London in early 1964, but this later ended in divorce.[108]
She married actor Tim Flavin in New York in April 1985 after a courtship of just two weeks but he had a number of affairs during their marriage which ended in divorce in 1986.[109]
She subsequently married sound engineer Tom Button, some two decades her junior, in New York in January 1992. The couple, who met working on a production of Cats in Blackpool in 1989, separated some years later.[110]
A keen gardener, during the 1980s, she had a house in Fulham, South West London and a country home in Chichester, West Sussex.[8][5] She then kept an apartment in Westminster, London, for many years.[111] Since the early 1990s, she has lived in a cottage in Langport, Somerset, which she shared with her mother, Selina, before her death.[11] During the 1970s, she owned a 1967 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.[112] Webb was at one time a patron of The Players Music Hall Theatre in London, which specialises in Victorian variety theatre.
Webb appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs in May 1982.[6] She selected the "Piano Concerto No.1 in B Flat Minor" by Tchaikovsky; "Una voce poco va" from The Barber of Seville; "The Swan" from The Carnival of the Animals; "Oh Happy Day" by the Edwin Hawkins Singers; "Layla" by Derek and the Dominos; "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon & Garfunkel; and "Space Oddity" by David Bowie. Her favourite selection was a recording of "The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-on-Sea" from The Goon Show. She also chose to take an illustrated dictionary and piano to her imaginary island.[113]
In early 2014, she said that she had been treated for an aggressive form of bowel cancer in 2006, just a month after the death of her mother.[114] The illness was not made public at the time and in fact Webb returned to the stage, including dancing in a pantomime, just two months after major surgery.
In a 2016 interview, she described herself as being semi-retired.[111]