Flick Rea

Felicity Marion Peel Rea (née Corbin; 21 May 1938 – 25 May 2026), known as Flick Rea, was an English Liberal Democrat politician who represented the Fortune Green ward on Camden Council for 35 years, before her retirement in 2021. She was the only child of Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Peel Corbin and his wife Phyllis (née Brabner). She was educated at Weirfield School in Taunton. It was her ambition to be an actress from the age of five, and she appeared in local amateur stage productions with the Pleiades Players and Taunton Thespians. After leaving school, she trained at Bristol's Hartley Hodder School of Drama, receiving training in dancing, fencing and elocution, and was by then known as Felicity Peel Corbin. During this period, she won the Hartley Hodder Cup for the best acting performance at the Taunton and Somerset Music and Drama Festival in 1954, and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art's silver medal.

She then completed a two-year course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, leaving in July 1958. A fellow student was Glenda Jackson, who would later become her MP. Rea was one of the last debutantes to be presented at Court. Her early credits included The Marriage-Go-Round, The Boy Friend, Simple Spymen, Watch It, Sailor, Julius Caesar and Love in a Mist. She also appeared in the film A Kind of Loving. She first stood for election to Camden Council in a by-election in April 1980, following the resignation of Fortune Green ward's Conservative councillor Richard Almond. Representing the Liberals, she came third behind the Labour candidate, with the Conservatives holding the seat. She again stood for the two-member Fortune Green ward (based around the area of the same name) in 1982, this time as a Liberal and Social Democratic Party Alliance candidate. The Liberals had come third behind Labour in Fortune Green at the 1978 election (when the ward was created), with the Conservatives winning both seats. However, Rea and her fellow Alliance candidate Esmond Hitchcock finished second to the Conservatives in 1982, with Rea being the closer of the two to being elected in what was a three-way marginal.

At the next council election, in 1986, Rea and Roger Billins gained both Fortune Green seats for the Alliance, under the banner of the Liberal Social Democratic Party Alliance Spotlight Team. She remained a councillor continuously from that point on. In 1990, she was elected as a Liberal Democratic Spotlight Team candidate, the Liberals by that point having merged with the Social Democratic Party to form the Liberal Democrats. In 2001, Rea became the first Liberal Democrat to chair a committee on Camden Council. She oversaw the scrutiny panel on the council's administration of its commercial properties and produced a report with the conclusion that "We're [Camden council] not actually very good landlords". In 2006, Rea was given the council's culture and leisure portfolio. Part of this included presiding over the restoration of the Prince of Wales Baths (now Kentish Town sports centre). She was the sole Liberal Democrat on the council in 2014, after all the others had lost their seats at that year's elections. In November that year, a motion was put forward to the council by Rea and her colleague Luisa Porritt calling for a second referendum on Britain's departure from the European Union; with the support of Labour councillors, it was passed. Rea retired on 4 June 2021, and her seat was retained for the Liberal Democrats at a 22 July by-election by Nancy Jirira. On 21 June 2022, Rea was appointed an honorary alderman of the London Borough of Camden.

In 2013, Rea received an MBE for services to local government. and helped organise West Hampstead's annual Jester Festival.

Personal life and death On 15 July 1962, she married fellow actor Charles Patrick Rea in Staplegrove, Taunton.

Rea died at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, on 25 May 2026, at the age of 88.