Lois Ramsay learns her versatility on Adelaide stage for TV roles from 'Mavis Bramston' to 'The Box', 'Prisoner'

Adelaide-born Lois Ramsay only became a professional actor in her forties.

Lois Ramsey, best known for her performances on The Box and Prisoner series, among many television character roles, learned versatility in amateur theatre in Adelaide in the 1950s, playing a wide variety of roles in drama, comedy, musicals and revue.

Ramsey appeared in early Australian television productions including Consider Your Verdict, Adventures Of The Seaspray, The Battlers, Riptide and Homicide. Her Adelaide revue work led to becoming an actor and writer in ground-breaking 1960s comedy series The Mavis Bramston Show. This opened the way to appearances on Homicide, The Sullivans, The Young Doctors, A Town Like Alice, Cop Shop, A Country Practice, Harp in the South, Poor Man’s Orange, GP, All Saints, Always Greener, Water Rats, Blue Heelers, E Street, Home and Away and Rake.

Her portrayal of tea lady Mrs Hopkins (or “Mrs H”) in the long-running series The Box was her most prominent role. She played the character for the show’s entire four-year run as well as in the movie spinoff. She often played eccentric old ladies on television soap operas. Ramsay appeared twice in Prisoner: Cell Block as dotty social worker Agnes Forster in 1980 and a more prominent role in 1985 as an elderly inmate Ettie Parslow, who thought that World War II was still on.

Her appearance in the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) series Grass Roots brought an AFI (Australian Film Institute) award in 2000 for best performance by an actress in a guest role in a television drama series.

Ramsay's film credits included Film credits included Undercover, One Night Stand, Road To Nhill, Crackerjack and Boy Town. She had numerous roles with the Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company, including playing Emma in its 1995 revival and Australian tour of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and as Baby in Michael Gow’s On Top of the World (1990) that later toured to London.