Tenko Cast Then and Now 2026 | Who's Still Alive After 45 Years?

Forty-five years after Tenko locked thirteen women behind the wire of a Japanese internment camp, we track down every face from the BBC's landmark 1981 to 1984 wartime drama and answer the question its fans keep asking, who is still alive in 2026 and who have we lost. Ann Bell, who held the whole camp together as Marion Jefferson, is eighty-eight and was widowed after thirty-three years of marriage to Robert Lang. Louise Jameson, the Cockney survivor Blanche Simmons and once Leela in Doctor Who, is seventy-five and still on your television every week in Emmerdale. Stephanie Beacham walked out of the wire and into Hollywood as Sable Colby in Dynasty and The Colbys, all of it while deaf in one ear since birth. Stephanie Cole, Veronica Roberts, Claire Oberman, Josephine Welcome, Cindy Shelley and Emily Bolton took very different roads out of that camp, and one of them gave up acting at the height of it. Four are gone. Burt Kwouk, the complicated Major Yamauchi and Cato of the Pink Panther films, died in 2016. Renée Asherson, who nursed the film legend Robert Donat and stayed his widow, died at ninety-nine. Jean Anderson was still on stage at ninety-two. Patricia Lawrence, the camp's fearsome Sister Ulrica, was the first of these women to leave us. This is the complete Tenko cast then and now, forty-five years on, with the shocking changes and the ones you would never recognize today. New cast Then & Now stories drop here every week — subscribe so the next reunion finds you.