Liz Walker obituary
My mother, Liz Walker, who has died aged 72, was a waxworks creator for attractions, shows and films,She and my father, Brian, ran the Walkers Tussauds Waxworks business from the mid-1970s onwards, starting in her home town of Bridlington in Yorkshire and expanding across northern England with the occasional incursion into the south, and later overseas,Naturally artistic, a good painter, dressmaker and modeller, Liz was a great asset to the venture,She was particularly adept at sculpting the physiognomy of the famous, and also created intricate sets and authentic props, painted background scenes, recorded ambient soundtracks and made the models’ costumes,She was also a good signwriter.
Liz was born in Bridlington to Robert Lenthall, a miner who later joined the RAF, and his wife, Betty (nee Giles), a bus driver,After leaving Headlands secondary school in the town in 1967 she worked at a jewellers, where within seven weeks she was promoted to manager,In 1970 she met Brian, a member of a showman family, and they married in 1974,She left the jewellers and for a time they both worked in Brian’s family business until they decided to branch out on their own,Waxworks were all the rage at the time, and so they opened their own attraction on Royal Princes Parade.
Over the next few years, as Liz’s talents became more widely known, she was occasionally asked to create figures and unique pieces for use in films, including Dracula (1978), Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979) and Popeye (1980).In 1979 she and Brian created the Movie and Television World of Wax in Blackpool and the following year staged their first venture in London, an attraction called the Palladium Cellars in the bowels of the Palladium that featured waxworks of film stars and horror exhibits inspired by Hammer films.They used the profits from both ventures to open other attractions during the 1980s, including the White Horse Wax Museum in Whitby, the Mountbattens Nightclub & Restaurant in Bridlington and the nationwide Treasures of Tut-Ankh-Amun.In 1988 they gained permission to bring a genuine Chinese terracotta warrior to the UK, the first to appear in the country, after talks that included the British Museum and the Foreign Office.It was put on show at their various venues and was returned to China in early 1991.
In 1996 Liz and Brian went to Benidorm, Spain, to set up Mundo de lo Fascinante y lo Increíble, a permanent exhibition with a large number of waxworks that explored the bizarre and the unexplained.It was designed to appeal to pan-European audiences but failed to do so, and in 1997 they returned to embark on their last major project, in Hull, where they took over the old Fort Paull, restoring its buildings, grounds and subterranean passages and creating a chronological historical cyclorama with waxworks and other curiosities.That venture was more successful, winning a best newcomer to tourism award, but was too great an undertaking considering that Liz was by then suffering badly from arthritis and Brian had a damaged spine.After Brian died aged 50 in 2001 of cancer, business opportunities faded away.Living in reduced circumstances back in Bridlington, Liz worked on various projects within the confines of her arthritis, including the making of doll’s houses and the restoration of old furniture.
She is survived by me.
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