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Dame Dorothy Tutin (1930-2001), actress, was born on 8 April 1930 at 63 Warrington Crescent, London, the only child of John Tutin, naval architect, and his wife, Ada Evelyn (Adie), nee Fryers. She had a half-brother, Eric, five years older, from her mother's first marriage, who died aged ten. She was educated at St Catherine's School in Bramley, Surrey, but she left at fifteen to train as a musician. She spent a year studying the piano, flute, and singing, but decided that she was not talented enough. Her parents persuaded her to go instead to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, although much later she said, 'I never, ever wanted to act' (The Times, 7 Aug 2001), and she was afflicted throughout her career by nervousness and a lack of self-confidence.



Tutin's first stage appearance was at the club theatre, The Boltons, where in September 1949 she played Princess Margaret in William Douglas Home's The Thistle and the Rose. She joined the Bristol Old Vic Company in January 1950, where among other parts she played Phoebe in Shakespeare's As You Like It. She returned to London for the Old Vic's 1950-51 season. She was meant to be understudying Anouk Aimee as Princess Katherine of France in Henry V, but Aimee was unavailable and Tutin got the role, for which she won excellent reviews. That season she also played Ann Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Win-The-Fight-Littlewit in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. At the Lyric, Hammersmith, in September 1951 she played Martina in Christopher Fry's Thor, With Angels. She then played Hero in John Gielgud's production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Phoenix in January 1952; dissatisfied with her acting, she was about to give up the stage when she was cast as Rose Pemberton in Graham Greene's The Living Room (1953), playing a Catholic girl driven to suicide through her guilt at having an affair with a married man. Kenneth Tynan described her in this role as 'ablaze like a diamond in a mine' (The Times, 7 Aug 2001). The Living Room made her name on stage and brought her the Variety Club's actress of the year award, but it also destroyed her soprano singing voice. As she later recalled, the director complained, 'You're being too British! Where's your temperament?'. So she went on stage and screamed and choked. 'That caused my trouble. I went to a voice specialist who said I had to be silent for nine days. We opened in Edinburgh in ten' (Daily Telegraph, 7 Aug 2001). The nodules healed, but her singing voice never fully returned.



Tutin scored another triumph at the New Theatre in March 1954 playing Sally Bowles in I am a Camera, based on Christopher Isherwood's novel, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), later to become the musical Cabaret. Caryl Brahms applauded her for the skill with which she combined 'the satiric with the entirely credible', and memorably described her voice as 'the kind of curdled cooing that could only come from a turtle-dove with laryngitis' (Daily Telegraph, 7 Aug 2001). Tutin's next play, a translation of Jean Anouilh's The Lark in which she opened at the Lyric, Hammersmith, playing Joan of Arc in March 1955, was less successful, and was compared unfavourably with Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan starring Siobhan McKenna, which was then playing in the West End. At the Saville in December she was Hedvig in Ibsen's The Wild Duck. Caryl Brahms, who did not care for the play, bemoaned the fact that she played the part at all, but noted that it was inevitable, since all serious young actresses wanted to play Hedvig. She won better reviews for her portrayal of Caroline Traherne in John Whiting's The Gates of Summer (on tour in 1956), and of Jean Rice, playing opposite Laurence Olivier, in John Osborne's The Entertainer (at the Royal Court in 1957).



In 1958 Tutin joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford upon Avon where she played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and, directed by Peter Hall (who became a great admirer), Viola in Twelfth Night. Peter Jackson wrote: 'Dorothy Tutin's golden Viola is wonderfully boyish, breathless, bewildered and always completely audible. She is alive and to be alive in a cast like this [it included Geraldine McEwan, Richard Johnson, and Patrick Wymark] means working double overtime.' Further successes followed as Ophelia in Hamlet (in which part she toured with the company to Leningrad and Moscow in December 1958), Portia in The Merchant of Venice in 1960 (Peter Roberts comparing her conception of the role to that of Ellen Terry), and Cressida in Troilus and Cressida in the same year. She received the Evening Standard award for best actress for her portrayal of Viola in Twelfth Night at the Aldwych in December 1960. In February 1961 she played Sister Jeanne in John Whiting's The Devils, which Peter Hall had commissioned specially for his first London season at the Aldwych. Frank Granville-Barker called it a brilliant new play, comparing it to Peer Gynt and King Lear, and was particularly enthused by Tutin's performance. Back at Stratford in August 1961 (with what was now called the Royal Shakespeare Company) she once more played Juliet and was Desdemona to Gielgud's disatrous Othello, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. She was with Gielgud again in December 1961 when at the Aldwych they were in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. In January 1963 she made her New York debut with the company in The Hollow Crown, devised by John Barton.



On 23 December 1963 Tutin married Derek Barton-Chapple (b. 1926/7), the actor Derek Waring. He was the son of Harry John Barton-Chapple, electrical engineer. They had two children, Nicholas and Amanda, who as Nick Waring and Amanda Waring followed their parents into the acting profession. 'We never thought they would act', Tutin later said. 'They had seen so much of the pain and anguish of the profession' (The Times, 7 Aug 2001). Nevertheless she was delighted by her children's success.



Following her marriage, Tutin continued to receive plaudits for her work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and elsewhere. At the Bristol Old Vic in March 1965 she played Queen Victoria in an evening compiled from documentary material and letters, called Portrait of a Queen. Her portrayal of Rosalind in As You Like It at Stratford in 1967 and in Los Angeles the following year won glowing reviews. She then took on the lead in the musical (based on H. G. Wells's novel) Ann Veronica, opening at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, in 1969. Nevertheless she was uncertain about her ability to succeed in such a role, and chose not to play the part in London. Notable further successes included her portrayals of Francine in Play on Love at St Martin's Theatre and Alice in Arden of Faversham at the Roundhouse, both in 1970, Kate in Harold Pinter's Old Times at the Aldwych in 1971, and Peter Pan at the Coliseum in 1971 and again in 1972.



At Chichester in 1974 Tutin played Natalya in Turgenev's A Month in the Country, and the critics agreed it was the best thing in the season. In November 1974 she played Maggie in J. M. Barrie's What Every Woman Knows at the Albery Theatre. Garry O' Connor acclaimed her 'completely endearing and moving performance, in which there is no nuance of understanding or sharpness of mind passed over. Miss Tutin has a perfect combination of toughness and pathos' (Daily Telegraph, 7 Aug 2001). In the following November she played Natalya once more, at the Albery, and once more received the Evening Standard award for best actress. Further triumphs in the late 1970s included her portrayals of Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard, Lady Macbeth, Lady Plyant in Congreve's The Double Dealer, and Genia Hofreiter in Tom Stoppard's version of Schnitzler's Undiscovered Country, all at the National. In the 1980s and 1990s she was less often seen on stage, and complained of the lack of parts for women 'of a certain age' (The Scotsman, 7 Aug 2001). Nevertheless she gave memorable performances as Hester in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea (at Greenwich in 1981), Sarah Bernhardt in Ronald Harwood's After the Lions (at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 1982), Deborah, a woman recovering from sleeping sickness in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska (at the Duchess in 1985), and the widowed sister in Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs (at the Aldwych in 1987). A late success was as one of the inmates of an old people's home in D. L. Coburn's The Gin Game (at the Savoy in 1999). She was also a regular, and much acclaimed, fixture at the Chichester festival.



Tutin scored notable early film successes as Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest (1951), Polly Peachum in The Beggar's Opera (1954), and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities (1956). Later successes included Sophie Brzeska in Ken Russell's Savage Messiah (1972), for which she won the Variety Club's award for best film actress of the year, and Lady Minnie Nettleby, opposite James Mason as Sir Randolph Nettleby, in The Shooting Party (1984). Her last film was Maybe Next Year (1998). Later in life she said that 'I would have loved to be in more films, but I didn't exactly have "the face of the moment" when I was young' (The Independent, 7 Aug 2001).



Somewhat contradictorily, she also said, 'I think we get what we desire. I was once offered a Hollywood contract but I turned it down. I wouldn't have been right for it. I didn't want the trappings that went with it. So perhaps I got what I desired: a great deal of hard work and not much money. I wanted to be a good actress'. (The Times, 7 Aug 2001)



Tutin was even less proud of her work for television, and in her Who's Who entry recorded merely 'Has appeared on television'. Nevertheless, her television appearances included a much-acclaimed portrayal of Anne Boleyn in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), a notable success as Sarah Burton in the thirteen-episode serialization of Winifred Holtby's South Riding (1974), and a well-received performance as Florence in The Great Kandinsky (1995), as well as many lesser roles.



Small and elfin, Tutin was described by Caryl Brahms as

a small-scale hurricane. And once she is unleashed upon a part, there is bound to be, one feels, a short, sharp tussle. But Miss Tutin comes out on top, and having subdued it to her temperamental and technical measure, parades in it, all smiles and sequinned tears. She can be gay, pathetic, lively, stunned-part minx, part poet, part sex-kitten. A comedienne of skill and a pint-sized tragedienne. (The Guardian, 7 Aug 2001)



She was made a DBE in 2000, having been appointed CBE in 1967. In her last years she suffered from acute myeloid leukaemia, from which she died at the King Edward VII Hospital, Easebourne, Sussex, on 6 August 2001. She was survived by her husband, Derek, and their two children.





Sheridan Morley