Mary Cook em Lisboa, a tocar no piano que era dos Avós Salomão e Sara, e ficou para o meu Pai, 1996, na Av. António Augusto de Aguiar – Fotografia de José Manuel Seruya
Mary Cook
Sun 7 May 2006 at 00:11
MARY COOK, who died last month aged 93, was described by the jazz pianist and presenter Steve Race as “the great unsung heroine of British show business”. As head of entertainments at the Nuffield Centre in central London, and of the BBC Auditions Unit from 1947, she was responsible for launching the careers of some of the biggest stars of the 20th century.
Mary Cook was born on June 27, 1912, at Southend, Essex. Her early education included a spell at the Royal Academy of Music, where she proved an outstanding pianist, winning several prizes.
She played the piano at a dancing school in Shaftesbury Avenue and, with the actor Peter Bull, earned pin money by giving demonstrations in West End hotels. In 1931, with her friend Madeline Sharp and eight pupils, she opened the Bromley School of Dancing. Within two years she had 250 pupils and more schools.
In 1939 Mary went to Lisbon to take over a weekly radio programme of light music for tourists. She also ran the entertainments at the Casino Estoril, started another dancing school and married a Portuguese nobleman, Count Saul Seruya, known affectionately as “Foxy”. In the early years of the war she helped to raise money for the British Red Cross through various activities in Lisbon.
Keen to get back to England, in October 1943 she hitched a lift on an RAF Liberator and went to see Louis Dreyfus, boss of music publishing firm Chappells, to ask if he had a job for her. He had.
In great secrecy she was sent to a room on the third floor of Claridges Hotel. The door was opened by “a funny little man in bare feet and pyjamas and very, very heavy specs, looking rather lost and miserable”. The funny little man turned out to be Irving Berlin, who needed someone to persuade the cast of his show, This Is the Army, brought over to London from Broadway, among them Burl Ives, Gary Merrill and Ronald Reagan, to rehearse. Mary became Irving Berlin’s secretary during the rest of his stay, and took musical dictation, admitting some responsibility for one of his less memorable numbers, My British Buddy, a song she described as “really hopeless”.
In 1944 Mary Cook took over as head of entertainments at the Nuffield Centre that had opened the previous year in the disused Cafe de Paris, off Leicester Square. She was brilliant at spotting talent. Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Benny Hill, Tommy Cooper, Tony Hancock, Michael Bentine, Frankie Howerd and Ronnie Corbett were among those who got their first breaks at the centre during her time there.
After the war she juggled her work at the centre with auditions for the BBC. Television was just getting going again, and Mary Cook’s job was to choose from among the throngs of singers, musicians, conjurors, comics, impressionists, jugglers, strong men and fire-eaters who fancied their chances in front of the cameras. In her first five years in the job, with the young Steve Race as her resident accompanist, she heard and saw more than 5,000 acts.
During the Fifties and Sixties she gave piano recitals at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, the Wigmore Hall and at prisons, including Dartmoor.
In later years she became a director of Solve Your Problem, a London agency which specialised in finding nannies, cooks and other domestic staff at short notice. She found a secretary for Rebecca West and housemaids for Lady Churchill and the late Duchess of Gloucester. Among the young women for whom she found employment as a babysitter and mother’s help was Lady Diana Spencer.
Mary Cook’s husband is thought to have died during the war. She never remarried.
© Telegraph
Certidão de Casamento de Saul Seruya e Mary Cook
