Early Life and Career
Felicity Kendal was born in Olton, Warwickshire (now West Midlands), England, in 1946, and is the younger daughter of Geoffrey Kendal and his wife Laura (née Liddell). Her elder sister, Jennifer Kendal, also became an actress. Their father, Geoffrey, was an English actor-manager who made his living leading a repertory company on tours of India after the Second World War. They would perform Shakespeare before royalty one day, and in rough rural villages the next where audiences included many schoolchildren. Her father had adopted his birthplace of Kendal, (then Westmorland now Cumbria), as his stage name, his original surname being Bragg. Felicity Kendal was educated at six convents in India.
Kendal made her stage debut aged nine months, when she was carried on stage as a changeling boy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Later she started her career proper at the age of 19 and starred in the Merchant Ivory film, Shakespeare Wallah (1965), loosely based on her family's real-life experiences. At 21, Kendal returned to Britain against her father's wishes, where she found that her film appearance was not a passport to immediate success. She made her London stage debut in Minor Murder (1967), and went on to star in a number of well regarded plays.
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