Celia Mitchell

CELIA Mitchell, who has died aged 91, enjoyed a starry career as an actor – and closer to home, brought the pleasure of the written word to thousands of parents and children through her Highgate book shop, Ripping Yarns.

As well as being a well-known theatre, TV and film actor, Celia was immortalised in a poem by her late husband, Adrian Mitchell.

He wrote the poem Celia, Celia for her “When I am sad and weary, When I think all hope has gone, When I walk along High Holborn, I think of you with nothing on…”

The pair met at a party in St Johns Wood in 1961 and spent the next decades supporting each other’s careers in drama and literature. Celia was born in 1933 in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. She had no siblings and left home aged 16 to head to London.

Her father was not keen on her ambition to go to university, and believed she should find a clerical job and get married.

This was not Celia’s style. Instead, she attended the Oxford School of Acting before finding work in West End jazz clubs.

She earned enough to put herself through Queens University, studying French and Spanish. Success on screen followed: she appeared in the 1956 TV series The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel and then she was a Rank Starlet – a young British female actor employed by Rank Films.

The old Ripping Yarns bookshop

It led her to appear in numerous English movies, including Dunkirk and The One That Got Away, and classic series including Dixon of Dock Green. Celia performed in rep theatre, and often work reflected her love of English literature: she had appeared in Great Expectations and David Copperfield.

She suffered a tragedy when she was in her early 20s and engaged to a double bass player in a jazz band called Hugo.  He was killed in a car accident, leaving her bereft.

Two of Hugo’s friends tried to help her and would take her to jazz shows.

At a post-gig party, she spotted a poet across the room wearing a CND badge. It was Adrian Mitchell. The couple fell for each other and married in 1964.

Their first child Sasha was born in 1962, with another daughter, Beattie, born in 1965. The couple settled in St John’s Wood in their early married life, but due to their work they did not stay in one place for long.

Celia Mitchell as a younger woman

They moved home 19 times, with spells in Yorkshire, Belsize Park, South Hill Park – where they would live three times – Kentish Town and South End Green, before finally settling in Brookfield Park, Dartmouth Park, in 1995. Celia established an antiquarian bookshop for children and adults called Ripping Yarns in the 1980s on in Archway Road.

An expert in children’s literature, she loved Victorian and Edwardian authors. Ripping Yarns had a secondary role: Celia provided work at the shop as a support network for drama students, musicians and actors between jobs.

Celia was a political beast. A Communist in her youth, she then joined the Labour Party. Her politics were so strongly embedded that if she met anyone with right wing views, she would show no interest in them.

Music was important. She loved jazz and classical composers and had an open mind in terms of genres: after Adrian died in 2008, she found solace in listening to the Glaswegian pop singer Paolo Nutini. A huge Francophile, she had been to Brittany as a teenager. Coming from a rationed Britain, her eyes were opened by trying food she had never imagined.

An excellent cook, she loved a market and was happy browsing ingredients. Eating out was also greatly savoured: Villa Bianca in Hampstead and Jimmy’s (the Greek) in Soho were regular haunts.

Celia loved dogs and cats – she had several Golden Retrievers, the last of which was Daisy, and then a blind Welsh Terrier called Myvvy whose excellent sense of smell made up for her lack of sight. Myvvy would never lose a ball.

She is survived by her daughters Sasha and Beattie and four grandchildren, Caitlin, Zoe, Lola, Annie and Mitch.