Sylvia Young obituary: founder of stage school that trained Amy Winehouse

Times

11 hours ago

'My school reports are filled with 'could be betters' and 'doesn't work to her full potential',' wrote a 14-year-old Amy Winehouse in her audition letter for the Sylvia Young Theatre School. 'I want to go somewhere where I am stretched right to my limits and perhaps even beyond. But mostly, I have this dream to be very famous. I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes.'
Known as the 'Eton of the Pop Idol generation', the school was notoriously competitive — each year 20 students, aged between ten and 16, were accepted out of 800 applicants — but Winehouse's audition was so impressive (she sang a soulful rendition of On the Sunny Side of the Street) that she was offered a scholarship by the founder, Sylvia Young, who remembered her as very talented and very naughty: she never wore the uniform correctly, chewed gum in lessons and was easily bored by school work. 'She wore a silver nose-ring and, when I asked her to take it out, she apologised, removed it, and replaced it an hour later,' Young said. 'I could not ignore it but I understood and we found a way of coexisting. She would break the rules; I would tell her off; and she would acknowledge it.'
Though Winehouse left the school early — Young was eager to point out that she wasn't expelled — she was one of many young stars to have emerged from the Sylvia Young Theatre School, which was for many years the most successful and well known of its kind. At the time, most stage schools were still stuck in the 'light entertainment and song and dance' era, she said; Young's was firmly rooted in 'drama'. She provided a newly launched EastEnders with many of its young stars, including Nick Berry and Danniella Westbrook. Almost half the cast of Sam Mendes's 1994 adaptation of Oliver! — and five of the six young leads — were Young's 'babies', as she called her students.
Other alumni included the actors Billie Piper, Nicholas Hoult and Daniel Kaluuya, and musicians such as Emma Bunton from the Spice Girls and Dua Lipa. It wasn't always easy to tell who would make it, even though Young had, in hindsight at least, spotted star quality in Winehouse: 'You see the ones that should, but it doesn't always work,' she said. 'It is talent, but it's also the right job at the right time. Pure luck.'
Young's idea for the school was born in the early Seventies when, as a part-time librarian with a passion for musical theatre, she began putting on shows in care homes with her two daughters. Soon their primary school in Wanstead, east London, had caught wind of the travelling company and asked Young if she could run an after-school drama group to raise funds for a swimming pool.
The classes proved so popular that after the fundraising Young kept them going, charging 10p a lesson — it included a cup of orange squash and a biscuit — at Aldersbrook Baptist Church hall. The Aldersbrook Young 'Uns, as she christened the group, were soon performing music hall-style shows across London. 'I remember coming home and saying to my husband, 'There's not an ounce of talent among them'. It killed me to draw whatever it was out, and then — just when I thought I'd have to chuck it all in — they started blooming, and I found that incredibly rewarding.' People began calling her Sylvia Young-un and the name stuck.
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By 1981 she had gone full time, increasing the fee to 50p a week and hiring a drama teacher who operated from an old sports club in Drury Lane, in which classes were held in an old boxing ring. The school later moved to Marylebone, and then to a converted church near Marble Arch, its present location.
At the start, academic standards were not a priority for Young, who would happily halt school for four weeks to rehearse a play, but when league tables were introduced in the 1990s the school was forced to bring in qualified teachers and three days of academic teaching, leaving Thursday and Friday for singing, dancing and acting lessons.
Although it became known as 'a sausage factory' for famous people — 'and I suppose it is', Young said, 'but they're individually made sausages, not mass-produced' — she had an eagle eye for pushy parents, who would write and claim to have a child with prodigious talent. 'Sometimes they're right,' she said. 'More often you have to say, 'There might be something there. Do carry on with your singing.' You can tell when a child is being pushed. I get a little report on Mum too. We can't bear the dance-school thing here — we do get a few lispy little girls. I gently squash them.'
She was born Sylvia Bakal in Whitechapel, east London, in 1939, the eldest of nine children to Abraham, a tailor's presser of Belgian and Romanian heritage who later owned a betting shop, and Sophie (née Wexler), also from Romania. A thespian in the making, Sylvia liked to claim her grandmother knew Leon Trotsky as 'little uncle Leo'.
During the war she was sent to live with a mining family in a village near Barnsley. On her return to London, where they lived in a three-bedroom council flat, she visited the local library every day to read — mostly plays. By the age of 16 she had left school and taken a job as a librarian, 'primarily because I wanted to be able to buy stockings'. She had hopes of becoming a star but suffered from stage fright: when she joined Mountview theatre company in north London she would lose her voice before every production, in what she later recognised as panic attacks.
In her early twenties she married Norman Ruffell, a telephone engineer at the Post Office, and became something of a stay-at-home mother, though she was never what one might call domestic. 'I don't cook,' she said. 'My kitchen is bare. In fact my whole house bears the signs of someone who doesn't spend much time there. Dinner could be another ready meal or egg on toast.' Her husband did all the cooking, cleaning and ironing.
On family holidays to Pontins camps, Young entered her daughters into talent contests. One, Frances, was a pupil at the Sylvia Young Theatre School but was promptly thrown out for answering back too much. She went on to win a Tony for playing Éponine Thénardier in the original West End production of Les Misérables. Her sister, Alison, is now managing director of the school. Young is survived by both daughters and her husband.
Petite and matronly, with a soft, plummy accent, Young was a mother figure to many of her students, but she came under criticism, too. Billie Piper's autobiography claimed that the school instilled a negative body image in its pupils: Young was left to dismiss claims that the girls were fed carrots and forced to walk around in ankle weights.
Young kept in touch with Winehouse after she left the school, arranging an audition with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra when she was 16. As the singer's struggles with fame and addiction began making headlines in 2007 she wrote an open letter to the Daily Mail: 'I want her to become a legend — but in her lifetime, not after.' At the end of the letter she reprinted Winehouse's audition essay.
Sylvia Young OBE, stage school head, was born on September 18, 1939. She died on July 30, 2025, aged 85