Su Pollard, born Susan Georgina Pollard (7 November 1949), is a British actress best known for playing Peggy Ollerenshaw, the overenthusiastic chalet maid in all nine series of Hi-de-Hi!.
Her interest in acting began when she played an angel in a school nativity play at 6 years old. Upon leaving school when she was 16, she began singing in men's clubs and at charity shows.
In The '70s she began appearing in various musicals and farces, appeared on ITV Talent Show Opportunity Knocks in 1974, and was in a 1978 revival of Godspell with a young Anthony Head, before landing her first sitcom role in 1979 as Flo in Two Up, Two Down. Only one series aired, but that same year Pollard received the script for the Hi-de-Hi! pilot. Peggy only had one major scene in the pilot, but Pollard's performance stuck with audiences and with each following series Peggy was focused on more often and was Promoted to Opening Titles starting in the sixth series after Simon Cadell left.
At the height of her Hi-de-Hi! fame, she picked up her singing career again and made a brief but startling foray into the upper reaches of the pop charts, scoring a no.2 hit in early 1986 with the single "Starting Over"note , though it proved to be a One-Hit Wonder and her album Su stumbled to a slightly less impressive no.86 at the end of that year.
After the end of Hi-de-Hi!, David Croft gave her starring roles in two more of his sitcoms, these being clumsy maid Ivy Teasdale in You Rang, M'Lord? and flustered booking clerk Ethel Schumann in Oh, Doctor Beeching!.
With her signature spectacles, toothy grin, and breathless enthusiasm, she is still a recognizable face in British Pantomime to this day. In 2023, she was one of the participants in the fifth series of The BBC's 'group of mismatched celebrities trek a historical pilgrimage route together' series, Pilgrimage
.
Works on TV Tropes she appeared in:
Films- Run for Your Wife (2012) — Shopkeeper
- Two Up, Two Down, 6 episodesshow list (1979) — Flo
- Hi-de-Hi!, 58 episodes (1980-88) — Peggy Ollerenshaw
- Jackanory, 5 episodes (1987) — Storyteller
- You Rang, M'Lord?, 26 episodes (1988-93) — Ivy Teasdale
- Penny Crayon, 12 episodes (1989-90) — Penny Crayon
- The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends, episode "The Tale of Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddle-Duck" (1993) — Jemima Puddle-Duck
- Oh, Doctor Beeching!, 20 episodes (1995-97) — Ethel Schumann
- Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, episode "Singing in the Drain" (2001) — Heidi Honeycomb
- Little Robots, 2 episodesshow list (2003) — Noisy
- Benidorm, 1 episode (2010) — As Herself
- Doctors, episode "Feud" (2018) — Mary Dunlop
