Ysanne Churchman 1925 - 2024

The actress Ysanne Churchman has died at the age of 99.

Ysanne Churchman worked on 11 episodes of Doctor Who providing the voice of Alpha Centauri, the hermaphrodite hexapod who appeared alongside Jon Pertwee's third Doctor in the two Peladon stories in the early 1970s. She returned to the character in 2017 alongside the Twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi in Empress of Mars.

Ysanne Churchman was best known as one of the earliest soap stars, playing Grace Archer in the BBC Radio series The Archers. She made history in 1955 when 20 million people tuned in as her character was killed in a fire, a spoiler to draw the audience away from the launch on the UK's second television channel, ITV. 

Born in Sutton Coldfield in the English Midlands, Churchman was a performer by the age of 13 with regular appearances in BBC Radio's Children's Hour.  

Radio was her main medium but she regularly appeared on British Television in series such as Z-Cars, Crossroads, The Railway Children, Sherlock Holmes and Softly Softly. 

Churchman was married to BBC engineer Tony Pilgrim from 1951 until he died in 2015.

She died on the 4th July, 2024.