Virginia Stride

Virginia Thomas (born 1936), professionally known as Virginia Stride, is a British actress on stage and screen who first came to public attention on television in the 1960s. She was the first wife of the actor John Stride (1936–2018), whom she met when they were studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and in 1964 she introduced the first programme to be seen on BBC Two. Early years Virginia Stride was born in Yokohama, Japan. She was, in her own words, a "fat little girl" and, although she became slimmer in her teens, her self-consciousness about this in childhood had made her sceptical of an acting career. In the event, she went to RADA rather than read English at university, and took her husband's name for professional purposes because of pressure from agents who felt that Virginia Thomas "didn't sound quite right". Television in the 1960s Virginia Stride played the recurring role of control room radio operator Katy Hoskins in Z-Cars (1962–64), the long-running BBC television series about the police in a fictional town near Liverpool. In 1964 she appeared in an episode of The Avengers as Alice Brisket, secretary to Quilpie (played by Ronald Radd), who was the controller of John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman).