Trivia

Her one-woman show of songs by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht was savaged by British TV critic Bernard Levin. Levin was attacked for his remarks by her husband, Desmond Leslie, during a live broadcast of That Was the Week That Was (1962).

Her father was director Rudolph Bernauer.

Became notorious as the first non-stationary nude in English theatre.

She spent the later years of her life with her second partner, the historian and author Maurice Craig, in Sandymount, County Dublin.

She was a Berlin-born expatriate actress and singer, who lived in England for many years, then in Ireland.

Upon leaving school, Agnes worked sporadically as a shorthand typist and fledgling actress (adopting the stage name 'Bernelle') in London theatres and with touring repertory companies.

She sang a duet with Marc Almond on his The Stars We Are album, a song called Kept Boy.

Bernelle died 15 February 1999 in Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, Dublin. At the funeral mass in St Mary's Star of the Sea, Sandymount, the coffin was draped with her favourite black feather boa.

As an international cabaret singer she collaborated on record with artists such as Marc Almond, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and The Radiators.

Bernelle was Catholic. She converted to Catholicism in the mid-1930s along with her father, Bernauer, who was Hungarian and Jewish. Her German mother, Emmy (née Erb), was Protestant.

During the Second World War, she became involved with top secret British Special Operations radio broadcasts. Transmitting from Woburn Abbey alongside the top secret Enigma project, she was introduced to black propaganda. She was recruited for her native German language skills and was suggested by her father, Rudolf Bernauer, after he was sought out for his theatrical and German connections, operating under the code name "Vicky".

Joining the Free German League of Culture, an anti-fascist refugee group formed by established artists, she performed in their satirical revues.

Her radio broadcasts on Deutscher Kurzwellensender Atlantik were bounced over to Germany and primarily were aimed at spreading confusion and lowering morale among German forces, along with being littered with code messages for resistance fighters on the continent disguised as record labels and numbers.

The Fun Palace, her autobiography, was published in 1995.

In 1978, Bernelle appeared Off Broadway in New York City in the American premiere of Bertolt Brecht's Downfall of the Egotist Johann Fatzer, with Shelter West Theater Company at the Vam Dam Theatre, directed by W. Stuart McDowell, with an original musical score of ballads sung by Bernelle, composed by Tony Award-winning composer/arranger, Bruce Coughlin.

Bernelle was married from 1945 to 1969 to Desmond Leslie (1921-2001). Leslie briefly became notorious for assaulting Bernard Levin during a live transmission of That Was the Week That Was in 1962 for writing a hostile review of one of his wife's performances. The show was "An Evening of Savagery and Delight" which had rave reviews at the Dublin Festival but lasted only three weeks at London's Duchess theatre and polarised audiences. On the first night an usherette tipped a tray of hot coffee into Levin's lap, which may have affected his view of the performance. Bernelle bravely posted all the bad reviews along with the good outside the theatre.

She released three albums. The first, Bernelle on Brecht and... was produced by Philip Chevron of The Radiators and released in limited numbers by the Midnite Music Company in 1977. In 1985 she released Father's Lying Dead on the Ironing Board, again produced by Chevron. This was followed in 1988 by Some Bizzare label produced album, Mother, The Wardrobe is full of Infantrymen. The first two albums are filled with songs from Weimar cabaret (her father Rudolf Bernauer owned and ran three cabaret theatres in Berlin during the Weimar Republic years) and the third has more modern updates on the form with songs from Tom Waits and Roger McGough.

An oft-repeated story is that a broadcast by Bernelle caused a U-boat captain to surrender by informing him that his wife - whom he had not seen for two years - had given birth to twins.

She was the wartime "Black Propaganda" radio announcer code named "Vicki" for the British Political Warfare Executive.

Her mother was employed by her father - Rudolph Bernauer - from c.1907 as governess to his children, and married him some years after the death of his first wife.

Receiving her early education in Berlin, Agnes had a comfortable and cultured upbringing, steeped in the city's artistic and intellectual life (Albert Einstein was a neighbour, and Marlene Dietrich's daughter a childhood playmate), and from an early age aspired to a career in the performance arts.

Throughout the 1950s, Agnes acted regularly in West End theatre, and in radio, television and film. Her most celebrated performance was in the title role in a 1956 production of 'Salomé' by Oscar Wilde, in which, while performing the 'dance of the seven veils', she became the first non-stationary nude on the British stage, in contravention of the lord chamberlain's censorship regime.

Through a career marked by recurring rediscoveries by new generations of performers and audiences, her 'slightly out-of-the-way songs' (Ir. Times, 27 May 1998) provided a consistent alternative to mainstream commercialism, kitsch and cultural complacency.

Though she had long tolerated her husbands - Desmond Leslie - many infidelities, and indulged in a few of her own, Bernelle's discovery that Leslie was supporting a steady mistress and their two daughters in a Dublin townhouse severely strained the marriage, which finally broke down in 1969, when Bernelle returned to Castle Leslie from a holiday with her children to find that Leslie in their absence had changed the door locks, obtained a Mexican divorce, and married the other woman.

Her radio work included appearances in two internationally syndicated series produced by Towers of London, opposite Orson Welles in The adventures of Harry Lime (1951-2 season), a prequel to the famous Carol Reed film The third man, and opposite Marius Goring in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1952-3 season).

Long regarding her cabaret shows as secondary to her acting, Bernelle eventually acknowledged the greater success and acclaim she attained as a singer.

Her performance as a dying woman in Still life (1999), her last movie role, filmed after her own diagnosis with terminal lung cancer, won a jury citation at the Palm Springs short film festival.

Upon moving to Dublin in 1970, Bernelle briefly managed a clothing boutique and resumed her performing career.

Suspending her performance career, Bernelle followed her husband in January 1964 to his family's ancestral home, Castle Leslie, in Glaslough, Co. Monaghan, where Leslie hatched a series of schemes of varying practicality in efforts to make the property financially viable. Bernelle assisted in operating a nightclub-discotheque, Annabel's on the Bog, in the estate's hunting lodge, and managed a cottage knitwear industry employing local women.

Appearing off-Broadway in the American premiere of 'Downfall of the egotist Johann Fatzer' (1978), an adaptation of an unfinished play by Brecht, Bernelle performed songs composed for the production and woven into Brecht's script.

She had a close relationship from its inception with the Project Arts Centre, of which she was a long-serving board member and sometime artistic director. Unusually for a woman at the time, she directed eleven plays at the Project, including a version of Franz Wedekind's 'Lulu' plays, the ancient Greek comedy 'Lysistrata' by Aristophanes, and the musical 'Archie and Mehitabel'.

From an appearance in the movie Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), Bernelle compiled some thirty screen credits, her feature films including The quare fellow (1962), The great train robbery (1979), and Hear my song (1991). Television appearances included episodes of The adventures of Robin Hood (1955) and The Irish RM (1985); the television film The country girls (1984); and the mini-series Caught in a free state (1984) and Bluebell (1987), about the dancer Margaret Kelly.

From the late 1970s, she also performed 'Conversations about an absent lover', a one-woman play by Peter Hack about Goethe's mistress.

Following her father to London in 1936, Agnes completed her education in a north London boarding school (1936-1939). They were joined in 1939 by Agnes's mother, who, pressurized to undertake espionage work for the SS, fled Germany dramatically on the eve of the war. Many relatives who remained were to die in concentration camps.