Part of the fun of this hobby is trying to track down those elusive performers who seem out of reach. Marianne Stone was one such performer!

Marianne has always been a favourite of mine. She's one of those performers, like Julian Orchard, Michael Ward, Brian Oulton, Margaret Nolan and Michael Nightingale, who pops up in Carry On after Carry On in supporting roles, but Marianne is the best of the supporting stars in my opinion and I dearly wanted to write to her, but I didn't have a contact address!

I put my thinking cap on and wrote to the BBC, Equity and The Spotlight to see if they could help. The replies I got were ambiguous to say the least. The BBC could neither confirm nor deny that they had an address for Marianne, but suggested I write a letter to her care of their BBC Information address! Equity sent my letter back with the comment "no agent's address known"! Did this mean they didn't have an agent's address but they did have Marianne's home address? And the Spotlight wrote back saying that Marianne was no longer advertising with them but they had an address on file from several years before!

Not knowing what to do for the best I thought the easiest thing to do was to send a letter to Marianne care of the BBC, The Spotlight and Equity and hope for the best! Hopefully one of the letters would reach her! While writing the letters I suddenly remembered reading somewhere that Marianne had been a guest at the Carry On reunion bash at Pinewood in May 1998. So while I was at it I sent a fourth letter off to Pinewood Studios and kept my fingers crossed!

Waiting was agony! First the BBC letter came back - "Return to Sender, no forwarding address known"! Then the Spotlight letter was returned! Spotlight had forwarded my letter to Equity! And Equity had stamped "Return to Sender, no forwarding address known" on it and sent it back! So that dashed my hopes of the Equity letter reaching her (strangely that letter never saw the light of day!). Luckily Pinewood obviously did have a contact address for Marianne because on July 24 1999 my SAE was returned containing the above signed photo and two signed index cards. That wasn't a very good day for me as it happens, but thankfully Marianne's reply cheered me up no end. I went on to correspond with Marianne Stone a further twice that year and what a lovely lady she is. Sadly she's now retired but at least she's left behind a long list of film credits for us to enjoy!

Have a long and happy retirement Marianne! You deserve it!