Renee Goddard obituary

The Guardian

22-04-2025

Renee Goddard, who has died aged 102, came to Britain from Germany in 1934, with little education and no English. Despite being exiled as a child, she went on to develop a substantial career as an actor, script editor and screen commissioner.
As a performer, her TV appearances included The Glittering Prizes (1976) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984), but she achieved most through influencing scripts and production. This started in 1954, when Oscar Lewenstein, a West End producer and a champion of contemporary drama as general manager of the Royal Court theatre, appointed her as a script consultant. She had particular responsibility for introducing writers and directors from mainland Europe, and new British writers.
In 1955 she visited Bertolt Brecht in East Germany to assist Peter Daubeny in bringing the Berliner Ensemble to London for a season the following year that included Brecht's Mother Courage. Jean Genet's groundbreaking The Blacks was premiered in Paris in 1959, and two years later Goddard brought it to the Royal Court.
In 1964 she joined Associated Television, part of the ITV network with franchises in London and the Midlands, whose managing director was Lew Grade, and went on to become its head of scripts. Soon after her arrival, she was responsible for one of the first interracial kisses in the UK television drama, in the series Emergency Ward 10.
Prompted by the success of the BBC's science fiction series Doctor Who, the ATV script editor Ruth Boswell, another Hitler émigré, devised Timeslip with her husband, James. Goddard took it up for production, and the story of two time-travelling teenage friends – starting with a visit to Cornwall in 1940 – ran for 26 episodes (1970-71).
In 1972 she left to become a freelance consultant to international TV stations on scripts and drama operations. I first met her in 1980, the year that she founded the English-speaking theatre in Munich, which went on to run for six years. She was hosting a British Council-backed production of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker that I directed, and escorted me around Munich pointing out the beer cellars where Hitler had given speeches. Her English was truly the Queen's English, and her German was faultless.
She was in at the start with Channel 4 in 1982, introducing foreign drama to the network, and from 1988 she was secretary general of the European Community's script fund, forging alliances across Europe's media and entertainment industries.
Born in Berlin, Renee was the younger daughter of Emmi (nee Wiechelt) and Werner Scholem, the editor of the communist newspaper the Red Flag, and from 1924 a Reichstag deputy. Renee's first years were spent with her maternal grandparents in Hanover, where she was known as Reni (Renate) Wiechelt. Her Jewish father and gentile mother, also a communist, had an open marriage, and Renee knew nothing of her Jewish parentage.
To protect her identity, her grandparents enrolled her in the Hitler Youth. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Renate was taught how 'evil' the Jews were. When Hitler visited Hanover that year, she expressed pride at being chosen for the guard of honour to welcome him, waving her flag at the railway station.
Her mother's Nazi lover, Heinz Hackenbeil, got her out of Germany in 1934. In England, she was reunited with her sister, Edith, and her mother, who had fled to the UK via Czechoslovakia. Renee was sent to a Catholic school, but Jewish aid organisations insisted that she also learn about Judaism.
She was fostered by Naomi Birnberg, a leading member of the London-based Jewish Refugee Committee and mother of the eventual lawyer and civil liberties campaigner Benedict Birnberg. Renee was with the Birnberg family until her arrest as an 'enemy alien' in 1940, held initially at Holloway prison.
With 4,000 other German-born women, she spent 18 months behind barbed wire on the Isle of Man. She spoke of the indignity of being a Jewish escaper forced to share sleeping quarters with Nazi girls and women.
There she was told of her father's murder in Buchenwald. On her release she returned to London, married Gebhard Goldschmidt, who took the name George Goddard to serve as a British soldier, so giving her a professional name, too, and worked as a waitress at Lyons Corner House.
'They took me because they were short of girls for the night shift serving fire-watchers,' she said. As a 'nippy', she developed her appeal as an entertainer: 'I was popular because I could do cockney in the kitchen and then go la-di-da in the dining room. I got very good tips.'
A natural performer whose life had already instilled in her a capacity for reinvention, in 1943 she joined and did theatrical work with the Free German Youth, a communist organisation. For a couple of years she lived with the director Peter Zadek, another émigré, who went on to revitalise West German theatre in the 1970s, and starred in his then small-scale productions.
West End and Broadway experience came from minor parts in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra in a company led by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (1950-52). There was plenty of repertory theatre and radio work, and a film role came as Lady Branstead in Murder at 3am (1953), with Dennis Price as the police inspector. In John Van Druten's play I Am a Camera, adapted from Christopher Isherwood's novel Goodbye to Berlin, she was Natalia Landauer alongside Dorothy Tutin's Sally Bowles (New Theatre, now Noël Coward, 1954-55).
The launching of ITV in 1955 brought more opportunities for live broadcast drama. But by then she was already busy reading scripts and encouraging productions. In 2002 BBC Radio 4 broadcast Robin Glendinning's dramatisation of her early life, Reni and the Brownshirts.
Her marriage to Goddard ended in divorce, as did that to the actor Michael Mellinger, with whom she had two daughters, Andie and Leonie. In 1964 she married Stuart Hood, who had done much to reinvigorate BBC television. They divorced, and in 2000 she married Hanno Fry. He died in 2019.
She is survived by Andie and Leonie, and her grandchildren, Rose, Woody and Aurelie.
Renee Goddard, actor, script editor and screen commissioner, born 2 February 1923; died 12 March 2025