Wendy Richard, MBE (born Wendy Emerton 20 July 1943 – 26 February 2009) was an English actress best known for playing Miss Brahms in Are You Being Served? and Pauline Fowler in EastEnders. She was first educated at St George's Primary School in Mount Street, West London, before attending the Royal Masonic School for Girls in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, and then the Italia Conti Academy stage school in London.

She died on 26 February 2009 at the Harley Street clinic where she was being treated for a third bout of breast cancer.

Richard, an only child, was born in Middlesbrough in 1943. Her parents, Henry and Beatrice Emerton, were publicans and ran the Corporation Hotel in the town. Richard left Middlesbrough as a baby, when the family moved first to Bournemouth, then the Isle of Wight and finally to London. Here they ran the Shepherds Tavern in Shepherd Market, where Elizabeth Taylor and Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon were said to be customers. Richard attended the local primary school, St George's, but her education was interrupted when her family moved again, this time to the Valentine Hotel at Gants Hill, then in Essex, now in Greater London. Another move, to the Streatham Park Hotel in south London, followed a few months later. It was here, in December 1954, that Richard's father committed suicide. The actress, then 11, found his body. Her mother Beatrice never remarried, and died of liver cancer in May 1972.