Actor and former refugee Renee Goddard dies at 102

In that year membership of the Hitler Youth rose from 107,956 to 3.5 million. The young Renate knew nothing of her Jewish identity and eagerly joined the Jungmadelbund, the junior branch of the girls’ section of the Hitler Youth with the bribe of a smart jacket-and-skirt uniform and hiking boots. To protect her Jewish identity her parents sent her to live with her maternal grandparents while her mother Emmi worked full-time for the Communist Party’s central committee and looked after Renate’s elder sister Edith.

But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Renate was taught how “evil” the Jews were. With the looming danger for Jews, her parents decided it was safer for Renate to take her grandparents’ surname of Wiechelt.

“When my mother visited, she smelt of soap, and in a sense I didn’t know she was my mother. I went to a freethinkers’ school and hadn’t heard of Jesus by the age of ten. Then the authorities took the teachers away; I don’t know what happened to them. I didn’t really know what Jews were…

“My grandparents wanted our street to be a mantle over me, but I didn’t realise there was something to hide about me.”

Both her parents were arrested, but Emmi was released on bail and managed to reach Czechoslovakia and England. She arranged to bring 11-year-old Renate to England as a German-Jewish refugee and join her and her sister Edith in the UK.

But in England Renate felt a stranger both to her mother and sister. She was enrolled in a Catholic school, but Jewish aid organisations insisted she study Judaism. She was offered a home with Jonas and Naomi Birnberg, the sister of Norman Bentwich, first attorney general of Palestine.

Naomi was a leading member of the London-based Jewish Refugee Committee and mother of the future radical lawyer and civil liberties campaigner Benedict Birnberg. Renate was brought up with him as his foster sister.

She remained with the Birnberg family until 1940 when she was caught up in the national fear of a Nazi invasion. To appease the current paranoia, Churchill rounded up potential enemy aliens.

While studying for her matriculation the 17-year-old was arrested in her green school gymslip and interned as an enemy alien in Holloway prison. When her mother visited her, Goddard recalled: “The first thing she said was not, ‘How are you?’ but ‘What on earth did you do?’”

Goddard was then taken to Liverpool en route to internment on the Isle of Man. “Liverpool had just been bombed,” she says. “When we were walked double-file to the boats, not surprisingly the people thought we were enemy aliens and pelted us with rubbish.”

She spent 18 months incarcerated behind barbed wire with 4,000 German-born women on the Isle of Man. She recalled feeling the indignity of a Jewish refugee from Germany forced to share sleeping quarters with Nazi women.

“They were all Nazis to the core,” she said. “There were English Nazis too – upper-class English ladies who dressed for dinner. They were married to high-up Nazis (in Germany) and had been caught when visiting grandma when war broke out.”

During her internment the Red Cross came to tell her that her father had been shot by a firing squad at Buchenwald. On her final release from internment – she was detained after more than a year because she refused on principle to join the ATS, the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service – she returned to London and married Gebhard Goldschmidt, who changed his name to George Goddard, and began working as a waitress at Lyons Corner House.

It was there that her acting talents became evident. “I was popular because I could do cockney in the kitchen and then go la-di-da in the dining room. I got good tips.”

She expanded her thespian talents in 1943 by doing theatrical work with the communist organisation Free German Youth. She lived briefly with fellow emigré director Peter Zadek, performing in his avant-garde productions.

Her break came when she won minor parts in West End and Broadway productions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, in a company led by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh from 1950-52.

The followingyear she portrayed Lady Branstead in the film Murder at 3am with Dennis Price as the police inspector. In her next role she played Natalia Landauer alongside Dorothy Tutin as Sally Bowles in John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin at the New Theatre from 1954 to 1955.

Goddard always acknowledged the key influence on her life of Naomi Birnberg, who had changed the secretive habits of her childhood by urging her: “Speak your mind, Renate!” In the 1970s she joined the committee of the Women of the Year Lunch expressly to pay public tribute to Birnberg. “There was silence in the hall after I had talked about being integrated into British society.”

A woman who constantly reinvented herself, Goddard reaped the opportunities for live broadcast drama with the launch of ITV in 1955. Already busy reading scripts, she joined Lew Grade’s ATV channel as the head of the script department. She worked as a script consultant for producer Oscar Lewenstein and became Channel 4’s European representative, introducing foreign drama to the channel. Up to retirement, she was chief executive of the European Script Fund, providing development finance for film projects.

In 2002 BBC Radio 4 broadcast its Afternoon Play: Robin Glendinning’s drama of her early life, Reni and the Brownshirts: the Childhood of Renee Goddard.

Her marriage to Goddard ended in divorce, as did her marriage to actor Michael Mellinger, with whom she had two daughters, Andie and Leonie, and her subsequent marriage to Stuart Hood in 1964, who was credited with revitalising BBC TV.

In 2000 she married a fellow German-Jewish refugee, the scientist Hanno Fry, who predeceased her in 2019. She is survived by her daughters Andie and Leonie and her grandchildren Rose, Woody and Aurelie.

GLORIA TESSLER

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Renee Goddard: born February 2, 1923. Died March 12, 2025