Gay Soper

Who is Gay Soper?

Gay Soper is an English actress. She is perhaps best known for her performance in the musical Godspell in 1971, as well as Mme. Thenardier on the Complete Symphonic Recording of Les Misérables. She also performed all the voices for The Flumps, a famous children's TV series in Britain, and created the role of Mrs Bennett in Bernard J. Taylor's musical version of Pride and Prejudice.

Gay was educated at a convent in Surrey, St Anne’s College, and trained as an actress at LAMDA. Her career has spanned almost fifty years, beginning with playing Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on the original national tour in 1965. In 1974 she was an original cast member of the musical Billy based on the story of Billy Liar with Michael Crawford and Elaine Paige. In 1975 she starred in the British sex comedy The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, opposite her then-husband Barry Stokes.

Her theatre work includes: Good; Mother Courage; and Sunday in the Park with George, Jorrocks, The Canterbury Tales, Godspell, Billy, Side by Side by Sondheim, The Mitford Girls, Les Misérables, Which Witch, and Salad Days. She was in the original cast of the 1970s musical Betjemania based on the poems of John Betjeman. In 2010, she appeared with Opera della Luna as Little Buttercup in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore.