AN ACTOR, author, producer and playwright who had a lifelong affinity with a village in South East Cornwall has died at the age of 87.

Terence Frisby was best-known for There’s a Girl in my Soup, which, with a run of over 1,000 performances, became the longest-running West End comedy of the 1960s. The play exploring sexual relations of the era laid the way for a 1970 film starring Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn.

Frisby, who was born in New Cross London, was evacuated to Cornwall during the Second World War and stayed with Jack and Rose Philips at 7, Railway Cottages, Doublebois. He stayed in contact with the Philips for the rest of their lives, returning to Doublebois for holidays with his own son Dominic.

The radio play ’Kisses on a Postcard’ and subsequent book, published in 2009, tell of his experiences as a young evacuee. The musical play is described by Dominic Frisby ’as the best thing by far my dad ever wrote’ and it had been Terence Frisby’s enduring wish to see it performed in theatre.

’It fills me with regret that he never got to see it staged in the West End,’ says Dominic, ’this was not for want of trying.’

Dobwalls-born historian Rob Bonser-Wilton, who met Terence Frisby in 2018, describes Kisses on a Postcard as ’a book which brought much pleasure and understanding of the reality of World War Two for South East Cornwall to new generations of readers’.

Terence Frisby died on April 22 of complications ’resulting from treatment for bladder cancer which he did not have’, said his son.

’He died quietly and peacefully, holding my hand.

’Dad was still going strong at 87 and hustling. He wrote two books in the last three years and had just started work on another.’