Bournemouth’s Yorkshire Battleaxe.

Juliette Kaplin who played Pearl in 226 episodes of Last of the Summer Wine was born in Bournemouth. As Howard’s domineering wife, she was forever suspicious of her philandering husband’s pursuit of the peroxide-blond, seductive supermarket check-out assistant, Marina.

She spent her early years in South Africa and then New York before returning to Bournemouth at the age of eleven years. In her teens she attended classes at the Hampshire School of Drama. She paid her way by working as a chambermaid, telephone operator and sales girl. Juliette also trained as a dancer and appearing later in pantomime in Leamington Spa she performed the Sand Dance with Scottish actor Bob Fyfe who played her on-screen husband Howard.

Her real husband, Harold, owned a series of gift shops on the Kent coast. After his death, she continued to run them until she joined the cast of Last of the Summer Wine.

Juliette first played the role of Pearl during a summer season in Bournemouth in 1984 and then took on the role permanently. In 2003 and 2004, she appeared in a one-woman show Just Pearl in which she talked about her life with Howard, how they met and how she managed his philandering.

Ironically despite being best remembered as a Yorkshire battleaxe, Marlene Juliette Kaplin was a southerner by birth. She died on 10th October 2019 in Westgate-on-Sea, Kent at the age of 80 years.

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