"Needham" from her name and began using the stage name "Yootha Joyce" saying "it seemed less of a mouthful... being stuck with Yootha is enough". Joyce left RADA in early 1946, finding it unduly strict and unencouraging. Career Following her departure from RADA, Joyce toured the UK in many repertory theatre groups, including the Harry Kendall Players, the Reginald Salberg Players, the Jack Rose Players and the Harry Hanson Players, and received many positive reviews of her performances. In 1955, following a dry period of work, Joyce applied for work at a further repertory group based at the King's Theatre in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire in a production entitled The Call of the Flesh. The producer, Glynn Edwards accepted her audition and the two became good friends, and later lovers. Touring the UK in The Call of the Flesh the play was billed as "daring", "naked", "raw" and "gripping" and was a huge success. The theatre director Joan Littlewood was in the audience at one of the performances and was impressed to the extent that she asked Edwards to join her Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. By 1956, Joyce and Edwards had moved in together and rented a flat in Hampstead. During one of Littlewood's productions, Littlewood began looking for more female parts and Edwards suggested Joyce. She joined the production and became a member of the Theatre Workshop alongside other contemporaries including Barbara Windsor, Murray Melvin, Victor Spinetti, Bob Grant, Stephen Lewis, and Brian Murphy. Joyce married Edwards on 8 December 1956. She would confide in Edwards that her greatest fear was being without work and thought every job she would have would be her last. Although she appeared in a large number of Littlewood's productions, Joyce first came to prominence in Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be. Joyce made her first television appearance in 1962 in an episode of Brothers in Law, a sitcom about a young lawyer alongside a young Richard Briers and went on to make her film debut in Littlewood's film Sparrows Can't Sing (1963). Joyce and Edwards divorced in 1969 but remained close friends, to the extent that she used to console him after his subsequent relationships broke down. In the 1960s and 1970s, Joyce became a familiar face in many one-off sitcom roles and supporting parts in films, with her first main recurring role being Miss Argyll, frustrated girlfriend of the title