Pat Kirkwood was the kind of trouper who, as Noël Coward put it, “got them”. Moreover, she got them “roaring for more”. An actress and singer who quickly became a raven-haired queen of musical comedy, she filled stages and film and radio studios with such verve and spirit that, as a critic put it once, “she could gild any song”. As the “champagne girl” of the war years, Kirkwood was dubbed Britain’s answer to Betty Grable; her legs were famously described by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan as “the eighth wonder of the world”.

Even after her heyday as a serious actress on stage and screen she enjoyed a long career as a vivacious principal boy in panto, giving her last performance in Aladdin in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1973.

While her talent and success more than sufficed to keep her reputation fresh in the public consciousness, she was also dogged by rumours of a liaison with the Duke of Edinburgh after they were seen dancing one evening in London in the late 1940s. Kirkwood consistently took great pains to deny the rumours, even threatening to

take legal action when speculation emerged in royal biographies.

Although Kirkwood had a long career it was the musical side of it which counted most. Whether in cabaret, revue, music hall, variety, song-and-dance or pantomime her talent for getting on close terms with an audience reigned supreme.

Perhaps the key to her ability to rise above herself lay in the sort of people she worked with. From the word go she worked the halls with such figures as Fred Emney, George Formby, Bobby Howes, Billy Russell, Richard Murdoch and Jerry Desmonde.

With them she cultivated the exuberance and gusto which became a part of her theatricality. Her knack (which she seemed to develop into an art) of feeding stand-up comics or simply prancing about the variety stage kept her at the top of the tree.

She was also a close observer of her rivals. If anybody sought an affectionate impersonation of some legendary personality such as Vesta Tilley or Marie Lloyd, Kirkwood was there to deliver it with precision and affection.

In her years with Hubert Gregg, the actor, song writer, director and broadcaster, they worked up a partnership on stage, television and radio which took the pair of them to new heights in light entertainment in terms of musical comedy.

When the time came to go straight — when her talent and the fashion for her kind of song and dance faded — Kirkwood, instead of retiring, assumed on tours of thrillers and drawing room comedy the greater roles which brought her a new reputation.

Behind her energy, which was introduced at the Royal Hippodrome, Salford, Lancashire (not far from her birthplace), in a sketch called The Schoolgirl Songstress when she was 15 was a determined vitality which may have sometimes loomed too large in an era succumbing to the cinema but everyone agreed it was based on a personality brimming with theatricality. Within a year of her eruption Kirkwood had appeared often enough in variety to be promoted to the West End as Dandini in Cinderella (Princes, now Shaftesbury, 1937). Thenceforth she never gave up pantomime. Whether in London or the provinces, hardly a Christmas passed without one of her long-legged, thigh-slapping principal boys winning hearts as the shapely fugitive from the halls.

Pat Kirkwood was born in Pendleton in 1921, and educated at Levenshulme High School, Manchester. The same year as she appeared as The Schoolgirl Songstress she was in scores of local variety bills and engaged at Cardiff as Princess Dorothy in Jack and the Beanstalk. After two years on the variety halls and in cabaret she appeared in George Black’s London, Hippodrome revue, Black Velvet at the outbreak of the Second World War, though it was not until 1943 that she was rated “the West End’s finest principal boy with a lovely figure, a rare beauty and a grand voice”. That was when she played Prince Rupert in Humpty Dumpty (Coliseum).