to start with. Of one of her early performances for the military she later recalled: "The poor soldiers had to sit through it. I was so bad at the beginning. And they couldn't leave because there was a sergeant at the door!" But Farjeon persevered and as the war came to an end, with an act honed by the wartime experience of performing for mostly young French men, in 1947 Farjeon embarked in her mid-twenties on a professional stage career utilising to her advantage the theatrical persona she had developed of a "vibrant, roguish and bubbly" and occasionally saucy French chanteuse. It was an act which was to serve her as a character actor and performer for her entire career. The Players' Theatre Farjeon's first professional engagements were in the Late Joys Victorian music hall shows staged nightly at the Players' Theatre in London. The audiences liked her, and the performer Hattie Jacques, already a stalwart of the Late Joys, took to writing and directing highly successful "roguish and suggestive French chansons" for her. Farjeon was to work almost exclusively with the Players' Theatre company from 1947 as a member of the regular troupe of performers who presented the Late Joys music hall acts for which the theatre was famed, together with their annual Christmas pantomimes and occasional one-act plays. As "Violetta", her given name which she used for her single stage name at the Players', Farjeon continued to present her unique act there into her late seventies, making her last appearance in June 2003. The Boy Friend Farjeon made her name in the West End with a part written especially for her in a show which transferred there from the Players' Theatre in 1954. The company staged a comic pastiche musical of the 1920s written by Sandy Wilson and called The Boy Friend. It opened at the Players' in 1953 and after being extended played a short season at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage in London before opening at Wyndham's Theatre in the West End in January 1954. It ran for five years and a then record-breaking 2,078 performances. For over four years from its opening night at the Players' Theatre Farjeon played a chic but exuberant French maid, Hortense, who opened the show. Wilson recalled of the first night that "from the moment the curtain rose ... with Violetta perched on the edge of the sofa, telephone