Harold Brooke, playwright; born London, September 14, 1910, died London, December 1995

HAROLD Brooke, who has died aged 85, was, with his wife Kay Bannerman, a prolific writer of light comedies of which probably the best known was All for Mary (1954) in which two adult Englishmen are taken ill on holiday with something innocuous, but requiring them to be quarantined, and are nursed by their formidable English nannie.

Kathleen Harrison scored a huge success as the dragon nurse both on stage and in the film version, as did David Tomlinson who also recreated his stage role as one of the reluctant bumbling patients.

The couple's plays were full of classic English sexual situations, essentially innocent but implying dreadful improprieties, and people telling silly lies, when they lost their nerve, which were instantly exposed as falsehoods.

Their Let Sleeping Wives Lie (1967), set in a Brighton hotel, dealt with the scandalous behaviour of an American company inspecting the marriages of its English employees, and was one of farceur Brian Rix's hit plays.

The younger brother of the actress Ann Todd, Harold Brooke was educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge, and after the Second World War met Kay Bannerman, at the time a successful West End actress. They were married in 1946.

Their first play, written in 1945, was Fit for Heroes in which Irene Vanbrugh, one of the British theatre's grande dames of the day, endured life in a prefab. Another grande dame. Cicely Courtneidge, starred in their 1963 comedy, Let's Be Frank as a travel journalist who, horror of horrors, had written a successful book about somewhere she had not visited.

Kay Bannerman, by whom he had two daughters, died in 1991.