Stage school founder Sylvia Young, who helped discover Amy Winehouse, dies aged 86
Her daughter, West End star Frances Ruffelle, confirmed the news on social media.
She paid tribute to her mum, describing her as a "true visionary".
"She gave young people from all walks of life the chance to pursue their performing arts skills to the highest standard.
"Her rare ability to recognise raw talent and encourage all her students contributed to the richness of today's theatre and music world, even winning herself an Olivier Award along the way.
"She believed hard work with a bit of luck brought success, and she was an example of that herself."
The theatre school founder was awarded an OBE in 2005 for her services to the arts industry.
She helped to launch the careers of many stars, including presenter Denise Van Outen, Busted's Matt Willis, and McFly's Tom Fletcher.
Former student and podcast host Giovanna Fletcher said she was "heartbroken."
"My life would not be what it is without Sylvia Young," she said.
"I am heartbroken to hear that Sylvia is no longer with us. I owe her so much love and gratitude. My heart goes to her husband Norman, her family, and all who knew her. "
Presenter Tony Blackburn said he was "so sorry to hear Sylvia Young has passed away."
"She was a very lovely lady who I have had the privilege of knowing for many years."
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Telegraph
44 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Adrian Edmondson: ‘We boomers have made an unbelievable mess for our grandchildren'
'It's an interview,' Adrian Edmondson says, giving a sigh of resignation, 'so at some point I always talk about my problems. It always comes out: what kind of person are you…?' It's a reasonable question. First impressions count. We meet in the restaurant of a hotel in London's West End. Edmondson approaches the table with a wary gait, unassuming and unbothered, dressed in a corduroy jacket and jeans, his hair closely cropped. He offers a quick handshake and sits down, orders a beer, shoots me a guarded look and waits for me to say something. So what kind of person is Edmondson exactly? He is affable, quick to laugh and make a joke, as you might expect. At the same time, given to thoughtful silences, as if cautious about giving too much of himself away, but, it will later emerge, incapable of hiding his feelings – an open book, albeit one that's difficult to read. Adrian Edmondson first came to attention in the 1980s – one of the new generation of comedians that included Rik Mayall, Ben Elton and Jennifer Saunders – with The Comic Strip Presents and The Young Ones, in which he played Vyvyan, a fright-haired, heavily metal-studded punk, prone to outbursts of sudden, furious, slapstick violence. Since then he has been an actor, an author and scriptwriter, a director of pop videos for artists including Elvis Costello and Squeeze, a musician himself with his group the Bad Shepherds, performing a hybrid of punk and folk – a man who has done his best to escape what he describes as 'the historical version of myself'. He is now starring in Alien: Earth, the latest spin-off from Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction horror, Alien. The series, soon to start on Disney+, is set two years before the events of the original film, when a space vessel carrying a dangerous alien cargo crashes on Earth, which is now governed by competing corporations. Edmondson plays Atom Eins, the chief executive of one of them, which is owned by a youthful tech genius bent on transforming humanity – which, given Elon Musk 's bid for political power, may sound familiar. 'Yes, depressing how that's turned out,' he says, with a laugh. 'But don't they always say the best sci-fi is really just an examination of the present day? These scripts are more than two years old… and yet it's played out.' Edmondson's character, he says, is 'half diplomat, half thug. I love playing the heavy. And he's an increasingly heavy character. Frightening – I hope.' It's difficult to say too much about Alien: Earth. At the time of writing, the production company had only made the first episode of the series available for viewing, 'and they give you so many strictures about talking about things these days', Edmondson points out. He admits that the fizzing, hi-tech dystopian future depicted in the show makes him nervous. 'I'm having a very hard time with AI,' he says. 'I distrust it absolutely. These people – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs [Jobs died in 2011] – are my age, and they seem to have done something in their garage, while I was listening to Iron Maiden, that might not be for the good of mankind. 'I don't know whether that's just me being crusty, but I'm having a very hard time with it.' He laughs. 'I'm just glad I'm quite old.' Edmondson is 68 but jokes that he has no idea what age is. He lives in a house with low eaves, he says. 'When I stand at the bathroom sink to clean my teeth, I just see my chest. I never see myself. 'Occasionally I go to the village and see myself full-length in a window and think, 'Who the f--- is that old man following me around?' And it turns out it's me,' he adds. 'But this feels like a very different 68 than the 68 my parents had. And my grandparents were nearly all dead by my age – [they] looked doddery and ancient, like knackered horses.' Edmondson was born in Bradford, the second of four children. His father was a geography teacher who worked with British forces abroad, and the family lived in Cyprus, Bahrain and Uganda. At 12, Edmondson was sent to a boarding school in Yorkshire, the only child in the family to be sent away – fostering a sense of rejection that stayed with him for the rest of his life. The absence of love and the ubiquitous presence of violence are prominent themes in his 2023 autobiography, Berserker!. Twelve pages are devoted to accounts of the canings and other punishments meted out by his teachers at boarding school. He once calculated that he'd received a total of 66 strokes of the cane, as well as frequent slipperings. He also recounts being beaten up on a bus, and the mother of a friend slapping and hitting him, and washing his mouth out with soap for the crime of shouting out 'booby' over and over between bouts of helpless laughter. All of this left him, by his own admission, 'damaged, essentially'. But it also laid the foundations for the comic characters for which he would later become famous. He studied drama at the University of Manchester, where he met Mayall, the two men thrown together by an improbable mutual love of Laurel and Hardy and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which both had performed in school drama productions. 'We were the only people who thought it was a funny play,' says Edmondson. They began performing a comic routine as the Dangerous Brothers, which in 1979 led them to the Comedy Store in London, and a group of up-and-coming comedians, including Nigel Planer, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. From that grew The Comic Strip Presents, a series of half-hour films for Channel 4. At the same time, Edmondson, Mayall, Planer and Christopher Ryan starred in The Young Ones, a sitcom about a group of students enmired in squalor and bickering – which became a cult hit, setting the bar for manically surreal slapstick humour. Edmondson remembers that at the time of The Young Ones he would walk around Soho, where the Comic Strip team had their offices, and be constantly running into people who saw him as someone to have a fight with. ''I got Vyvyan to punch me in the face' seemed to be the game, although it never got that far,' he says. 'They saw you as the character you played rather than the person you are. I think people always do that. But they can't know who you are. Even I don't know that.' But you're not, I point out to him, a violent man. Edmondson was having precisely this conversation recently with the writer Louis de Bernières – he's not trying to name-drop, he says, but de Bernières read his autobiography and related to his account of how he was treated at school, and they met 'to swap notes'. 'We were discussing where the violence came from… but I don't know if it was violence, it was more excitability. I think I filled what I saw as a vacuum where love should have been. I didn't feel loved by anyone, and I filled that vacuum with a hunt for excitement. I think that's what all those characters are about, which is extremes.' But what is slapstick if it's not violence? 'What are Laurel and Hardy? It's not just very funny, it's very… charming,' says Edmondson. 'The other day I was watching Laurel and Hardy, and my five-year-old granddaughter appeared and I showed it to her. And she watched the whole reel, 20 minutes, laughing away.' He pauses. 'I think there's a point where violence – I sound like such a w----r – is quite loving.' Edmondson has spoken in the past of his belief that Laurel and Hardy provided the blueprint for all double acts. 'Morecambe and Wise stole their act from Laurel and Hardy, in a way.' He quotes the Morecambe and Wise routine: 'Two men in the same bed. 'My wife thinks I think more of you than I do of her.' 'Well, you do, don't you?' That thing of two men stuck together is a constant, isn't it?' Edmondson considers for a moment, before adding: 'Men have a lot of trouble talking to women…' And can have a singular kind of intimacy with each other. In 1991, Edmondson and Mayall co-starred in a West End production of Waiting for Godot, and the BBC sitcom Bottom, with Edmondson playing 'Edward Elizabeth Hitler' alongside Mayall's 'Richard 'Richie' Richard' – 'two losers', as Edmondson puts it, thrown together by an unspoken pact of neediness and dysfunction. 'Although they fight all the time, Eddie and Richie couldn't survive without each other. If they were alone, the world would be very sad,' he says. He doubts that The Young Ones or Bottom would be commissioned for TV these days, but not for fear of cancel culture. 'Our personal politics were quite rigorous, and I don't think there are any worrying attitudes,' he says. 'Sometimes people come up to me and say, 'You wouldn't get Bottom on the television these days because of political correctness.' I think you would. We're laughing that these two people think as they do. It's not what we thought ourselves. 'It was always quite difficult with Till Death Us Do Part and Alf Garnett. I used to watch that with my dad, and my dad would be laughing with Alf Garnett, and I'd be laughing at him. I don't think you'd get that on television now.' The reason Bottom would not be commissioned, he says, is because these days there's virtually no scripted comedy, apart from sitcoms such as the BBC's Mrs Brown's Boys and Not Going Out, to be found on television at all. If he wants to laugh, he says, he'll watch Have I Got News For You and Would I Lie To You?. 'And if we're really at a loss, if we've tried yet another box set and haven't got through the first episode because it's so boring, we'll slam on Seinfeld, because it's always funny.' His collaboration with Mayall writing Bottom was 'the best of times', he says, 'just sitting in a room together writing, just making each other laugh. We'd keep on going until we made each other laugh, and just wrote those bits down.' Bottom ran for three series on BBC Two between 1991 and 1995, and there were five stage show tours between 1993 and 2003 – at the end of which, says Edmondson, the act was looking 'a bit desperate' and he was ready to move on to other things. It was a decision Mayall never quite understood, and the friendship grew strained. In 2013 they attempted to revive the writing partnership with a spin-off from Bottom, Hooligan's Island, but it came to nothing. The following year, Mayall died from a heart attack at 56. Edmondson's friendship with Mayall is the subject every interview inevitably returns to, and he has long grown weary of talking about it. 'If this is just an article about me and Rik,' he says at one point, 'I'll be so bored. I have as-meaningful relationships with other men now – not ones I formed since he died but ones I formed before. 'I know it's easy to look back on our history and think it must have been for ever, but our fertile period was only 20 years…' – he pauses – '…which is quite a long time.' I don't want to play the amateur psychologist, I say. 'No, do,' he jokes. 'It's cheaper…' But I get the sense he's always been somebody who's emotionally very vulnerable. 'Yes. I would say that,' he agrees. 'I cry too much. I cry in happiness. I cry in despair. Sadness.' He pauses again. 'It's a very complicated world, isn't it? Especially when you've got kids and everything they bring. Nothing makes you quite as unhappy as when your child is unhappy. I think that's pretty true.' Edmondson has five grandchildren, 'and sometimes I think we've f----d the whole thing up for them. Our generation in particular, the boomers – we've f----d it up. 'We've had the best of it. The best of the NHS, the best music. We had all the trimmings,' he continues. 'We've all got our houses, when a house cost three times your earnings. Now it's, like, 27 times your earnings. How did we let it get like that? 'It's unbelievable the f---ing mess we've made. We haven't shared it. Most of us in our generation, I think, are Lefty liberals. Well, the ones I know are.' Many drifting rightwards, I say. 'Well, I don't know. I've got more vociferously Left.' Despite Keir Starmer, I proffer. 'Yes, well, he's not Left, is he? But this is very similar to Margaret Thatcher's time, isn't it, rather than any Labour government?' He falls silent and reaches for his beer. Pessimism always came naturally to Edmondson. He tells the story of a friend, Nigel Smith, with whom he wrote a TV series (it was originally a radio sitcom), Teenage Kicks, in 2008. 'He woke up one morning and his tongue felt fizzy,' he says. 'He rang a doctor friend, who told him to go to the hospital straight away. He was in a coma for a few months. Now he can't swallow, so he has to feed himself through a tube. He has a hard life. 'He writes comedy,' he continues. 'There's a great intimacy you can have in a writing partnership; you can talk about each other. I said to him, 'I don't know if I could be you. I think I'd do myself in.' He said, 'Yes, I know you – glass half empty.'' Edmondson tells me he takes mirtazapine, an antidepressant, each day. 'I'm medicated, is the professional phrase,' he explains. 'It's an anxiety stopper, and it works, actually. I got to the point where my body was just completely full of adrenalin. It felt like I was being frightened by a dog 24 hours a day. But I've come through that now.' At one point, he also underwent therapy, but soon gave it up. 'He didn't f---ing say anything! He just kept asking questions and never making statements. You've made more statements in this conversation than he ever did – and you're a journalist!' More helpful was a book about stoicism, Philosophy for Life: And Other Dangerous Situations, by Jules Evans, a philosopher and policy director at the Queen Mary University of London's Centre for the History of the Emotions. 'It was brilliant,' says Edmondson. 'So much so, I barely remember reading it, because it worked. The central message is: you can't control things that are outside your control, so don't worry about those.' For any actor, he says, insecurity comes with the job. There are times, he says, when he wishes he'd just been a carpenter. 'A proper cabinetmaker – nice furniture. Turn up every morning, do the work, go to the pub, go home – and not have any of the other stuff.' Stuff? 'Constantly worrying about whether you're going to ever get employed. I don't know any actor who's secure. Maybe at the very, very top. And if you're denied the opportunity by not getting through any of the auditions, then you quickly feel low. Because you are, quite literally, being judged and found wanting.' Nowadays he regards himself more as a writer than anything else. His first novel, The Gobbler, published in 1995, and Berserker! were bestsellers. And he is working on a new novel about a female singer who is a fan of one of Britain's finest ever folk singers, Sandy Denny. 'I sit down at my computer and write every day. Sometimes I think what I write is utter b-----ks, and sometimes I think it's absolute genius, and I don't know the difference between those days; I don't know what the trick is. But you just get through it. Write a load of b-----ks – and then go back and edit it, and you might get a line out of it.' Edmondson first married when he was 19. It lasted 18 months, before she threw her wedding ring under a passing car as they argued at the kerbside – and that was that. He met Jennifer Saunders at the Comedy Store, but it was three years before they actually got together, 'which I think was a great help. We'd seen each other in the world…' They have been married for 40 years, and have three daughters: Ella, 39, a mature student about to qualify with an MA in psychology; Beattie, 38, an actor and comedian; and Freya, 34, a costume maker. They have lived in Devon for 33 years. 'We have a very… sorted life,' he says of his marriage. They read the papers 'cover to cover' over breakfast – him The Guardian, her The New York Times, 'and then we swap notes about what's happening. And later we watch something that's been recommended in either paper, and it's always s--te.' They do the gardening. 'She does the posh stuff, I do the veg. People used to think we must live in sitcom land, but we actually live a life of, 'What's for dinner? There's five strawberries today on the plants, and we've got to eat more lettuce because it's bolting.'' The family is close. Each year they have a 'sacrosanct holiday' where everybody gathers together. In short, there is no reason whatsoever to think of his life as glass half empty. 'Exactly.' Edmondson sups at his beer. Alien: Earth, he says, describes a future when there are several different species of human and robotic beings, one of which is a synthetic body with a human mind. And it got him thinking about the fragility of consciousness and the fine line between life and death. 'I was there when my mother-in-law died. She was there, but not conscious. And then Jennifer's brother came [in] and that's when she decided to go, and we thought she must have known that he'd come, and then she was dead. And you think, it's just bizarre – just fall over, bang your head, and you could die. All that consciousness, all that struggle could be… gone. So why do we have it? What's it all about?' He seems to want an answer. Love? I say. 'That's what Louis de Bernières and I decided. We decided that all my earlier stuff was born of anxiety, and all my later stuff comes from a place of love. Not to be mushy, but that's where it comes from. A place of love.'
Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Daily Mail
What's Done Cannot be Undone by Athena Stevens: I never want to know the name of the arrogant doctor who left me wheelchair-bound for life
What's Done Cannot be Undone by Athena Stevens (HQ £18.99, 400pp) Athena Stevens doesn't know the name of the doctor whose arrogance gave her cerebral palsy. She prefers not to. 'Forgiveness, I think, is easier when you don't know someone's name.' Not that she has forgiven him. His actions bequeathed her with a lifetime of wheelchair-bound disability. 'Toxic optimism' is how Stevens describes his reassurances to her pregnant mother when the baby was facing the wrong way in the womb. 'It'll be fine! She'll probably straighten herself out in a few weeks!' But she didn't. For four catastrophic minutes during her birth in a Chicago hospital, Athena was starved of oxygen. As a result, she writes, 'my body hurries itself between being so low in muscle tension that it could melt into a puddle on the floor, and then jerking upright with a full-body spasm'. Stevens has 'disarticulate speech'. Her limbs and fingers are so hard to control that she types at just six words per minute. But this highly intelligent woman's eloquence comes across powerfully when those words hit the page. Her visceral memoir is a searing outpouring of 40 years of struggles, injustices, and victories. Stevens has become a successful playwright and actress. Her 2016 play Schism (about a disabled student in love with a failed architect) was acclaimed by critics, and she was nominated for an Olivier Award. Her ambition was scotched from the start. Her mother drove Athena around theatres but each one said they couldn't see how having her 'would work'. She and her parents had to fight for everything. Financial compensation came – but, as the Shakespeare quote in the book's title hammers home, what was done could not be undone. Her mother broke the news while tucking her up in bed one night: 'You'll never not have cerebral palsy, darling. It will always be part of your life.' She eventually went to one of the best schools in America, Stevenson High School, with a full-time aide, and then on to Davidson liberal arts college. One summer, the Royal Shakespeare Company visited. Stevens got on well with them and went on to do a summer course at RADA in London. A leading lady from the company, hearing her do a Julius Caesar monologue, said: 'This is going to be a long, uphill battle, but you have to do it. You have to pursue acting. It's going to take your fire to blaze a trail.' Reading this memoir you learn how litigious Athena can be. Most recently, she sued the Globe Theatre, where she was working as an Associate Artist. An actor friend had foolishly showed her some photos of his girlfriend topless. 'In the UK,' she explains, 'eliciting any sort of unwanted sexual activity, including showing people images that they did not consent to see, is legally sexual abuse when it is done to a 'vulnerable adult'.' When she heard that the Globe was about to hire him, she raised safeguarding concerns. They went ahead anyway, and put the project she was involved in on hold. So she sued them – for safeguarding issues, discrimination, harassment and victimisation. They reached a settlement in March this year. Throughout this impassioned narrative, Stevens returns to those fateful four minutes. 'The Very Bad Thing done to me on the Very First Day is something I cannot fix. And the weight of bearing it should not be mine.'
The Sun
11 hours ago
- The Sun
How Sylvia Young went from housewife charging 10p for drama lessons to theatre school boss who made Britain's top stars
FOR a housewife who started out charging ten pence for after-school drama lessons, Sylvia Young had an incredible ability to spot raw talent. The 85-year-old, who died on Wednesday, helped hone the skills of a who's who of the British entertainment industry. 15 15 15 Among those to have passed the audition to join her theatre school in London were singers Amy Winehouse, Leona Lewis, Dua Lipa, Rita Ora and three-quarters of All Saints. Dua, who has won seven Brit awards and three Grammys, said that she did not know she could sing until a teacher at the Sylvia Young Theatre School told her how good she was. Actors who attended her classes include Keeley Hawes, Doctor Who's Matt Smith, Nicholas Hoult, who is in the latest Superman blockbuster, and Emmy-nominated Adolescence and Top Boy star Ashley Walters. The school was also a conveyor belt for EastEnders stars, with Nick Berry, Letitia Dean, Adam Woodyatt and Dean Gaffney all passing through its doors. Stage fright But there were problems along the way. In 1998 one of the drama masters was arrested for indecent assault, and the company struggled to survive the Covid shutdown. The pressures of fame also proved too much for some former pupils, including the late Winehouse and EastEnders' original Mark Fowler, David Scarboro, who was found at the bottom of cliffs as Beachy Head in East Sussex in 1988. Sylvia, though, was loved by her former pupils, many of whom paid tribute to the 'backstage matriarch'. Keeley Hawes wrote: 'I wouldn't have the career I have today without her help'. And All Saints singer Nicole Appleton commented: 'This is going to really affect us all who were lucky enough to be part of her amazing world growing up. What a time, the best memories.' DJ Tony Blackburn added: 'She was a very lovely lady who I had the privilege of knowing for many years. She will be sadly missed.' Actress Sadie Frost commented online: 'What a woman, what a family, what a legacy! Sending everyone so much love and support. She was always so lovely to me.' And TV and radio presenter Kate Thornton said she 'meant so much to so many'. Sylvia did not boast about the success of her students and the school's website does not mention its incredible roster of ex-pupils. But it is hard to imagine a single drama teacher ever having as much impact as her. Sylvia's two daughters, Alison and Frances Ruffelle, who are directors of the theatre school, said: 'Our mum was a true visionary. 'She gave young people from all walks of life the chance to pursue their performing arts skills to the highest standard. 'Her rare ability to recognise raw talent and encourage all her students contributed to the richness of today's theatre and music world, even winning herself an Olivier Award along the way.' 15 15 15 Sylvia made it to the top of the British entertainment industry the hard way. She was the eldest of nine children born to Abraham Bakal, a tailor's presser, and housewife Sophie in London's East End. Born in 1939 just after the outbreak of World War Two she remembered the air raid sirens during the Blitz of the capital. She was evacuated to a village near Barnsley during the war, only returning home once it was over. At the local library she was gripped by reading plays and would meet up with friends to perform them. While still at school she joined a theatre group in North London, but her dreams of treading the boards in the West End were dashed by stage fright. She said: 'I used to lose my voice before every production. When I think about it, they were sort of panic attacks.' Instead, she married telephone engineer Norman Ruffell in 1961 and stayed at home to look after their two daughters. When Alison and Frances attended primary school, Sylvia started teaching drama to their fellow pupils. It cost just ten pence and the kids also got a cup of orange squash and a biscuit. Word spread and when her students got the nickname the Young-uns, Sylvia decided to adopt the surname Young for business purposes. The first Sylvia Young Theatre School was set up in 1981 in Drury Lane in the heart of London's theatre district. Two years later, it moved to a former church school in Marylebone in central London, where most of its famous pupils got their start. Even though it is fee-paying, everyone has to pass an audition — and only one in 25 applicants are successful. 15 15 15 15 It costs up to £7,000 per term for full-time students and only has places for 250 pupils aged ten to 16. There are bursaries and fee reductions for pupils from less well-off backgrounds, plus a Saturday school and part-time classes. Sylvia was always keen to avoid it being a school for rich kids. When she took an assembly she would ask pupils, 'What mustn't we be?', and they would shout back, 'Stage school brats'. Keeping kids level-headed when stardom beckoned was also important for the teacher. She said: 'I offer good training and like to keep the students as individual as possible. 'We develop a lot of confidence and communication skills. Of course they want immediate stardom, but they're not expecting it. You don't find notices up here about who's doing what. It is actually played down tremendously.' 'Baby Spice was lovely' A need for discipline even applied to Sylvia's daughter Frances, who she expelled from the school. Frances clearly got over it, going on to have a career in musical theatre and representing the United Kingdom in the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing tenth. Those genes were strong, with Frances' daughter, stage name Eliza Doolittle, having a Top Five hit with Pack Up in 2010. The ever-rebellious Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011 aged 27 from accidental alcohol poisoning, claimed to have been kicked out, too. She said: 'I was just being a brat and being disruptive and so on. I loved it there, I didn't have a problem, I just didn't want to conform. 'And they didn't like me wearing a nose piercing.' But Sylvia did not want Amy to leave. She said: 'She would upset the academic teachers, except the English teacher who thought she'd be a novelist. She seemed to be just loved. But she was naughty.' Other singers were clearly inspired by their time at the school, which moved to new premises in Westminster in 2010. 15 15 Dua Lipa, who went to the Saturday school from the age of nine, was asked to sing in front of other pupils shortly after joining. She said, 'I was terrified', but that the vocal coach 'was the first person to tell me I could sing'. Talent scouts and casting agents would put up requests on the notice board at the school. One such posting led to Emma Bunton joining the Spice Girls. Of Baby Spice, Sylvia said: 'She got away with whatever she could. But she was a lovely, happy-go-lucky individual with a sweet singing voice.' Groups were also formed by Sylvia's ex-pupils. All Saints singer Melanie Blatt became best friends with Nicole Appleton at Sylvia Young's and brought her in when her band needed new singers in 1996. But Melanie was not complimentary about the school, once saying: 'I just found the whole thing really up its own arse.' Casting agents did, however, hold the classes in very high regard. The professionalism instilled in the students meant that producers from major British TV shows such as EastEnders and Grange Hill kept coming back for more. Hundreds, if not thousands, of less well-known performers treading the boards of Britain's stages also have the school's ethos to thank for their success. Those achievements were recognised in the 2005 Honours List when Sylvia was awarded an OBE for services to the arts. Sir Cameron Mackintosh, who has produced shows including Les Miserables and Cats, said: 'The show that provided the greatest showcase for the young actors she discovered and nurtured is undoubtedly Oliver! which has featured hundreds of her students over the years. 'Sylvia was a pioneer who became a caring but formidable children's agent.'
