Anna Massey RIP

[chuffnobbler]

Oh bloody Nora ...
BBC News - Actress Anna Massey dies at the age of 73


Loved her as poor Babs in Frenzy. One of my faves.

This explains why she dropped out of Deathtrap in the West End, last autumn.

[Dr Amicus]

Anna Massey dies aged 73 | UK news | guardian.co.uk

If I remember correctly, she was in the running for the recent ITV Marple series - I'd hoped she'd get it.

Two performances of hers stick out in my memory - the lead in Hotel Du Lac, and (of course) as Daniel Massey's sister in Vault of Horror. Maybe not the one she'd like to have been remembered for though...

[batman]

She was an excellent actress who brought a touch of class to almost everything she appeared in. RIP.

[CLAMBAKE]

Sad news Anna Massey died 3rd July ..........I was immediately reminded of 'Peeping Tom' 'Frenzy and 'Bunny Lake Is Missing' she will be sadly missed

[CaptainWaggett]

BBC News - Actress Anna Massey dies at the age of 73

[ADMIRAL]

Press Association news release today tells of the death of Anna Massey:

Veteran actress Anna Massey has died at the age of 73.
Massey won a string of awards for her stage and TV roles, including a Bafta for her performance as a lonely spinster in the 1986 TV adaptation of Hotel du Lac.
Her agent said in a statement: "Actress Anna Massey CBE passed away peacefully on Sunday 3rd July, with her husband and son by her side. She will be remembered as a loving wife and mother, a cherished grandmother, a generous colleague and, always, a consummate professional. She will be greatly missed."
Massey's film work included roles in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, Possession with Gwyneth Paltrow and the adaptation of The Importance Of Being Earnest.

[Windthrop]

It has been reported that the distinguished actress Anna Massey has died aged 73.

RIP Anna

The Telegraph Obit

Anna Massey, who died on July 3 aged 73, was one of Britain’s most accomplished actresses; in a career spanning more than half a century, she worked with some of the world’s greatest directors, moving effortlessly between stage and screen.

With her urchin bob (she always wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn), she became one of the most familiar faces in British theatre. Unfailingly subtle, sensitive and intelligent, Anna Massey was, as one admiring critic put it, “one of those splendid British actresses whom one is tempted to call Dame before their time”.

Often cast in roles in which she portrayed the prim, the spinsterly or the repressed, in reality she was none of those things. Latterly she kept artifice to a minimum (“no Botox for me, and no facelifts”), wore little make-up and disarmingly claimed to be a “fully paid-up member of the plainer folk”. In her small, bright face her eyes were the most distinctive feature: they were not particularly large, but, as one critic pointed out early in her career, “she goes towards life with such zest that her eyes are always brilliant with excitement, and you think they are enormous.”

Although she made her first film aged 21, she was better known as a television actress, appearing in such classic BBC dramas as The Pallisers (1974) and the 1978 adaptation of Rebecca, in which she starred alongside her former husband, Jeremy Brett. She was also the narrator of This Sceptred Isle which ran for 216 short episodes on BBC Radio between 1995 and 1996, with further spin-offs in 1999 and 2001.

But Anna Massey’s luminous career concealed much inner turmoil. She suffered constantly from depression, and on stage or in front of the camera she was tormented by stage-fright and a fear of forgetting her lines, or “drying”.

“For a lively and talented actress,” declared WA Darlington of The Daily Telegraph, “she has a talent bordering on genius for denuding herself of charm and confidence.” “To be secure within myself,” she admitted in her memoirs, “proved to be an unattainable goal.”

Her life was overshadowed by the dysfunctional relationships with some of the men closest to her: her overbearing and egocentric father; her first husband (an actor who turned out to be gay); and her brother, Daniel Massey, yet another actor, from whom she was estranged for more than a decade.
Nor did the business of acting come easily or naturally; lacking a photographic memory, she always struggled to learn her lines, and in the search for the soul of her multifarious stage roles she clung to nostrums dispensed by troupers from an earlier age; one was Celia Johnson, who taught her always to find the character’s walk — “a route,” Massey agreed, “that takes you to the centre of a person”.
Anna Massey always hovered on the brink of international stardom, even though at 18 she had made a sparkling Broadway debut. “Hollywood never beckoned,” she insisted, dismissing critical admiration of her frail beauty. “I don’t have the face for it.”
Anna Raymond Massey — her father insisted on the middle name — was born in Sussex on August 11 1937, the daughter of the Canadian actor Raymond Massey and his English wife Adrianne (née Gladys) Allen, herself an actress. Raymond Massey was the son of Chester D Massey, the wealthy owner of the Massey-Ferguson tractor company, and became well known on television in the Fifties and Sixties as Dr Gillespie in Dr Kildare.
Anna was still an infant when her father left and moved to America to set up home with a lawyer called Dorothy Luddington. In a scenario redolent of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, Anna’s mother eventually married Dorothy Luddington’s first husband, another American lawyer, Bill Whitney.
All her life Anna Massey had a difficult relationship with her stepmother, holding her partly to blame for her own father’s detachment from her . On the other hand, she was fond of her stepfather, who exercised a stabilising influence on her family life. When, as a virgin bride in 1958 (“one of the last”), Anna was forced to choose who would walk her up the aisle, she chose her stepfather over her real one, who left in a rage and did not attend the wedding.
The dominant figure in her upbringing was her nanny, Gertrude Burbridge . On Burbridge’s death in 1968, Anna Massey would fall into a dark depression, emerging from it only after a gruelling course of psychoanalysis.
As a ginger-haired moppet, her education was patchy; she was evacuated to Wales early in the war and spent some time at her father’s house in New York. But she attended private schools in London and Surrey and spent an unhappy term in Lausanne, where she was so homesick that her mother was persuaded to bring her home. She went to Paris and to Rome to be “finished off”.
Her mother, a revered hostess and party-giver, presided over one of the most exotic and star-studded salons of post-war London: guests at her house in Mayfair included the composer Ivor Novello (the young Anna called him “Uncle Ivor”), the royal dress designer Norman Hartnell, the Australian dancer Robert Helpmann, the impresario Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont, and Noël Coward, who was godfather to Anna’s brother Daniel. Her own godfather was the American film director John Ford.
Although she took voice lessons, Anna Massey skipped drama school and joined a repertory company. In 1955, the year she was presented at Court, she made her stage debut in The Reluctant Debutante, which opened in the West End after a successful provincial tour.
The London critics loved her. “At 17,” enthused one, “the young lady is frankly a wow!” But Anna Massey found it so “incredibly nerve-racking” that the skin on her hands peeled from fright.
The play later transferred to New York, where she danced with Senator Jack Kennedy and encountered the magnetic Old Etonian actor Jeremy Brett , who was playing in Shakespeare on Broadway. Later they met again in London, where he urged her to move out of the family home to escape her mother’s dominance; they married soon afterwards.
The union was doomed from the start; Brett was a manic-depressive homosexual, and after several trial separations (while their son David was still a toddler), the couple split for good when Brett announced that he had met someone else: a man.
Although they divorced in 1962, the couple appeared together years later in the BBC’s dramatisation of Rebecca (1978), with Brett playing the haunted hero Max de Winter and Massey the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers. Their son, then 19, played a bit part in the production. Brett went on to achieve television fame as Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes .
In the years that followed her divorce, Anna Massey appeared in a series of West End hits. In 1962 she was directed by John Gielgud in Sheridan’s School for Scandal, in which her Lady Teazle was applauded as a performance of dignity and power. This was followed by The Right Honourable Gentleman (1964), The Glass Menagerie (1965) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1966).
As Katherine, she was heard with Richard Burton in an American recording of Henry V, and in 1965 starred with Laurence Olivier in Bunny Lake Is Missing, a film directed by Otto Preminger (“one of the cruellest and most unpleasant directors that I have ever worked with”). Another to earn her ire was Edward Bond (“the coldest man I have ever met”), who directed Massey in his play Summer.
Following the death of her nanny in 1968, and with her son David away at boarding school (a decision she always regretted), Anna Massey suffered a spell of anorexia; her chestnut hair turned white. Her stage fright turned to terror, and she blamed what she called “inner pain and panic at having to face life on my own”. But her demons were overcome for a time when she met a young actor called George Fenton, who moved in to her house in Fulham ; she abandoned the Hepburn look, permed her hair and affected hippy clothing. When they eventually parted, amicably but inevitably, she blamed the age gap. Fenton later gave up acting and became a film composer.
At the start of the 1970s Anna Massey appeared in the play Slag (1971) and struck up a lasting friendship with the playwright David Hare; she also starred in Alfred Hitchock’s penultimate film, Frenzy (1972).
Although she enjoyed playing Lady Laura Standish in the BBC series The Pallisers in the early 1970s, depression got the better of her, and her brother Daniel urged her to seek help. She did so, and spent 12 years in psychotherapy, rising at 5.30am thrice weekly to keep her appointment with the doctor. Although this helped her, it did not cure her chronic insomnia, which was overcome only later in life after she changed to a healthier diet and regular infusions of camomile tea.
Her most recent television period dramas included Tess Of The D’Urbervilles in 2008, Oliver Twist in 2007, and the BBC’s version of Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right in 2004. In 2006 she played Baroness Thatcher in the television film Pinochet In Suburbia. Most recently, in 2009, she appeared in Poirot and Midsomer Murders.
One of Anna Massey’s abiding regrets was the breakdown of her relationship with her brother Daniel, whom she accused of always siding with their mother when family tensions erupted. She was baffled and distressed to hear herself denounced by Daniel as an evil influence, and although they were reconciled shortly before his death in 1998, she remained deeply affected by their 12-year stand-off.
In the 1980s, with the television producer Sue Birtwhistle, Anna Massey bought the television rights to Anita Brookner’s novel Hotel du Lac; two weeks later it won the Booker Prize, and Massey went on to win the Bafta best actress award for her performance as Edith Hope in the 1986 BBC Television adaptation. Although she came to know Brookner quite well in the course of filming, Anna Massey — an indifferent cook — made the mistake of inviting her round for dinner; the evening was a culinary catastrophe and the guest of honour left before the end of the pudding.
But another dinner party two years later proved altogether more propitious: the host, Joy Whitby, a former producer of the BBC’s Jackanory series (in which Anna Massey had appeared, reading children’s stories ) introduced her to Uri Andres, a Russian metallurgist working at Imperial College, London. The couple married three months later, in November 1988, when Anna Massey was 50. “It was like an Anita Brookner novel with a happy ending,” she said. Personal happiness lit up the rest of her life.
In 2005 Anna Massey was appointed CBE for services to drama. Her autobiography, Telling Some Tales, was published the following year.
Anna Massey’s first husband Jeremy Brett died in 1995. She is survived by her second husband and by the son of her first marriage, the novelist and illustrator David Huggins.

[Harbottle]

Actress Anna Massey, who starred in a string of screen dramas, has died at the age of 73, her agent has confirmed.

BBC Link

[AR77]

Very sad news .... I'm just finishing reading her auobiography

BBC News - Actress Anna Massey dies at the age of 73

[Merton Park]

Aged 73 Daughter of Raymond Massey.

She was awarded a CBE for services to acting in 2004.

Great shame, I was only watching her in Peeping Tom last week.

RIP

[julian_craster]

Obituary: Anna Massey

Daily Telegraph
4 Jul 2011
Anna Massey - Telegraph

Anna Massey, who died on July 3 aged 73, was one of Britain’s most accomplished actresses; in a career spanning more than half a century, she worked with some of the world’s greatest directors, moving effortlessly between stage and screen.

With her urchin bob (she always wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn), she became one of the most familiar faces in British theatre. Unfailingly subtle, sensitive and intelligent, Anna Massey was, as one admiring critic put it, “one of those splendid British actresses whom one is tempted to call Dame before their time”.

Often cast in roles in which she portrayed the prim, the spinsterly or the repressed, in reality she was none of those things. Latterly she kept artifice to a minimum (“no Botox for me, and no facelifts”), wore little make-up and disarmingly claimed to be a “fully paid-up member of the plainer folk”. In her small, bright face her eyes were the most distinctive feature: they were not particularly large, but, as one critic pointed out early in her career, “she goes towards life with such zest that her eyes are always brilliant with excitement, and you think they are enormous.”

Although she made her first film aged 21, she was better known as a television actress, appearing in such classic BBC dramas as The Pallisers (1974) and the 1978 adaptation of Rebecca, in which she starred alongside her former husband, Jeremy Brett. She was also the narrator of This Sceptred Isle which ran for 216 short episodes on BBC Radio between 1995 and 1996, with further spin-offs in 1999 and 2001.

But Anna Massey’s luminous career concealed much inner turmoil. She suffered constantly from depression, and on stage or in front of the camera she was tormented by stage-fright and a fear of forgetting her lines, or “drying”.

“For a lively and talented actress,” declared WA Darlington of The Daily Telegraph, “she has a talent bordering on genius for denuding herself of charm and confidence.” “To be secure within myself,” she admitted in her memoirs, “proved to be an unattainable goal.”

Her life was overshadowed by the dysfunctional relationships with some of the men closest to her: her overbearing and egocentric father; her first husband (an actor who turned out to be gay); and her brother, Daniel Massey, yet another actor, from whom she was estranged for more than a decade.

Nor did the business of acting come easily or naturally; lacking a photographic memory, she always struggled to learn her lines, and in the search for the soul of her multifarious stage roles she clung to nostrums dispensed by troupers from an earlier age; one was Celia Johnson, who taught her always to find the character’s walk — “a route,” Massey agreed, “that takes you to the centre of a person”.

Anna Massey always hovered on the brink of international stardom, even though at 18 she had made a sparkling Broadway debut. “Hollywood never beckoned,” she insisted, dismissing critical admiration of her frail beauty. “I don’t have the face for it.”

Anna Raymond Massey — her father insisted on the middle name — was born in Sussex on August 11 1937, the daughter of the Canadian actor Raymond Massey and his English wife Adrianne (née Gladys) Allen, herself an actress. Raymond Massey was the son of Chester D Massey, the wealthy owner of the Massey-Ferguson tractor company, and became well known on television in the Fifties and Sixties as Dr Gillespie in Dr Kildare.

Anna was still an infant when her father left and moved to America to set up home with a lawyer called Dorothy Luddington. In a scenario redolent of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, Anna’s mother eventually married Dorothy Luddington’s first husband, another American lawyer, Bill Whitney.

All her life Anna Massey had a difficult relationship with her stepmother, holding her partly to blame for her own father’s detachment from her . On the other hand, she was fond of her stepfather, who exercised a stabilising influence on her family life. When, as a virgin bride in 1958 (“one of the last”), Anna was forced to choose who would walk her up the aisle, she chose her stepfather over her real one, who left in a rage and did not attend the wedding.

The dominant figure in her upbringing was her nanny, Gertrude Burbridge . On Burbridge’s death in 1968, Anna Massey would fall into a dark depression, emerging from it only after a gruelling course of psychoanalysis.

As a ginger-haired moppet, her education was patchy; she was evacuated to Wales early in the war and spent some time at her father’s house in New York. But she attended private schools in London and Surrey and spent an unhappy term in Lausanne, where she was so homesick that her mother was persuaded to bring her home. She went to Paris and to Rome to be “finished off”.

Her mother, a revered hostess and party-giver, presided over one of the most exotic and star-studded salons of post-war London: guests at her house in Mayfair included the composer Ivor Novello (the young Anna called him “Uncle Ivor”), the royal dress designer Norman Hartnell, the Australian dancer Robert Helpmann, the impresario Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont, and Noël Coward, who was godfather to Anna’s brother Daniel. Her own godfather was the American film director John Ford.

Although she took voice lessons, Anna Massey skipped drama school and joined a repertory company. In 1955, the year she was presented at Court, she made her stage debut in The Reluctant Debutante, which opened in the West End after a successful provincial tour.

The London critics loved her. “At 17,” enthused one, “the young lady is frankly a wow!” But Anna Massey found it so “incredibly nerve-racking” that the skin on her hands peeled from fright.

The play later transferred to New York, where she danced with Senator Jack Kennedy and encountered the magnetic Old Etonian actor Jeremy Brett , who was playing in Shakespeare on Broadway. Later they met again in London, where he urged her to move out of the family home to escape her mother’s dominance; they married soon afterwards.

The union was doomed from the start; Brett was a manic-depressive homosexual, and after several trial separations (while their son David was still a toddler), the couple split for good when Brett announced that he had met someone else: a man.

Although they divorced in 1962, the couple appeared together years later in the BBC’s dramatisation of Rebecca (1978), with Brett playing the haunted hero Max de Winter and Massey the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers. Their son, then 19, played a bit part in the production. Brett went on to achieve television fame as Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes .

In the years that followed her divorce, Anna Massey appeared in a series of West End hits. In 1962 she was directed by John Gielgud in Sheridan’s School for Scandal, in which her Lady Teazle was applauded as a performance of dignity and power. This was followed by The Right Honourable Gentleman (1964), The Glass Menagerie (1965) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1966).

As Katherine, she was heard with Richard Burton in an American recording of Henry V, and in 1965 starred with Laurence Olivier in Bunny Lake Is Missing, a film directed by Otto Preminger (“one of the cruellest and most unpleasant directors that I have ever worked with”). Another to earn her ire was Edward Bond (“the coldest man I have ever met”), who directed Massey in his play Summer.

Following the death of her nanny in 1968, and with her son David away at boarding school (a decision she always regretted), Anna Massey suffered a spell of anorexia; her chestnut hair turned white. Her stage fright turned to terror, and she blamed what she called “inner pain and panic at having to face life on my own”. But her demons were overcome for a time when she met a young actor called George Fenton, who moved in to her house in Fulham ; she abandoned the Hepburn look, permed her hair and affected hippy clothing. When they eventually parted, amicably but inevitably, she blamed the age gap. Fenton later gave up acting and became a film composer.

At the start of the 1970s Anna Massey appeared in the play Slag (1971) and struck up a lasting friendship with the playwright David Hare; she also starred in Alfred Hitchock’s penultimate film, Frenzy (1972).

Although she enjoyed playing Lady Laura Standish in the BBC series The Pallisers in the early 1970s, depression got the better of her, and her brother Daniel urged her to seek help. She did so, and spent 12 years in psychotherapy, rising at 5.30am thrice weekly to keep her appointment with the doctor. Although this helped her, it did not cure her chronic insomnia, which was overcome only later in life after she changed to a healthier diet and regular infusions of camomile tea.

Her most recent television period dramas included Tess Of The D’Urbervilles in 2008, Oliver Twist in 2007, and the BBC’s version of Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right in 2004. In 2006 she played Baroness Thatcher in the television film Pinochet In Suburbia. Most recently, in 2009, she appeared in Poirot and Midsomer Murders.

One of Anna Massey’s abiding regrets was the breakdown of her relationship with her brother Daniel, whom she accused of always siding with their mother when family tensions erupted. She was baffled and distressed to hear herself denounced by Daniel as an evil influence, and although they were reconciled shortly before his death in 1998, she remained deeply affected by their 12-year stand-off.

In the 1980s, with the television producer Sue Birtwhistle, Anna Massey bought the television rights to Anita Brookner’s novel Hotel du Lac; two weeks later it won the Booker Prize, and Massey went on to win the Bafta best actress award for her performance as Edith Hope in the 1986 BBC Television adaptation. Although she came to know Brookner quite well in the course of filming, Anna Massey — an indifferent cook — made the mistake of inviting her round for dinner; the evening was a culinary catastrophe and the guest of honour left before the end of the pudding.

But another dinner party two years later proved altogether more propitious: the host, Joy Whitby, a former producer of the BBC’s Jackanory series (in which Anna Massey had appeared, reading children’s stories ) introduced her to Uri Andres, a Russian metallurgist working at Imperial College, London. The couple married three months later, in November 1988, when Anna Massey was 50. “It was like an Anita Brookner novel with a happy ending,” she said. Personal happiness lit up the rest of her life.

In 2005 Anna Massey was appointed CBE for services to drama. Her autobiography, Telling Some Tales, was published the following year.

Anna Massey’s first husband Jeremy Brett died in 1995. She is survived by her second husband and by the son of her first marriage, the novelist and illustrator David Huggins.

[dylan]

BBC News:
Actress Anna Massey dies at the age of 73


Anna Massey appeared in BBC Radio 4 series Daunt and Dervish

Actress Anna Massey, who starred in a string of screen dramas, has died at the age of 73, her agent has confirmed.
Massey won many awards during her acting career, including a Bafta for her portrayal of a lonely spinster in a 1986 TV adaptation of Hotel du Lac.
The star also appeared in the film adaptation of AS Byatt's Possession, opposite Gwyneth Paltrow and was in Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 movie Frenzy.
She was awarded a CBE for services to acting in 2004.
The child of Canadian actor Raymond Massey - best known for his role as Dr Gillespie in the TV series Dr Kildare and West End actress Adrienne Allen - Massey was brought up in London but saw little of her father after her parents divorced when she was a year old.
Massey began her career on the stage, making her professional debut at the age of 17 in The Reluctant Debutante.
Her film debut was in 1958 in Gideon's Day, directed by her godfather John Ford.
Anna Massey played lonely spinster Edith Hope in Hotel du Lac

Her TV roles included notable costume drama turns as Mrs Danvers in Rebecca (1979), while she also appeared in an 1983 adaptation of Mansfield Park.

Her film credits include 1960's Peeping Tom, comedy The Tall Guy in 1989 and The Importance of Being Earnest in 2002.
She also starred in a 2004 BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right.
Two years later Massey portrayed Margaret Thatcher in television film Pinochet in Suburbia.
Most recently, she appeared in one of Jimmy McGovern's Moving On dramas on BBC One, credited as her last screen appearance.
"I find acting incredibly difficult - it demands much more of my time than it does for some people.
"I'm not instinctive. It takes enormous discipline and bravery to get me there," the actress told The Independent in 1996.
Massey was married to Sherlock Holmes actor Jeremy Brett for four years until 1962, and spent 27 years alone until she met her second husband.
Her agent said: "She will be remembered as a loving wife and mother, a cherished grandmother, a generous colleague and, always, a consummate professional. She will be greatly missed."

[wellendcanons]

This is very sad news. Anna Massey was one of those truly great British actresses. I didn't know she was estranged from her brother, Daniel. That's so sad. He was another great actor.

I was only watching Anna a couple of nights ago in an episode of Midsomer Murders. She is a very sad loss to our industry.

R.I.P. Anna Massey.

wec

[julian_craster]

Anna Massey obituary
Award-winning actor with a fastidious intelligence and a hint of inner steel

Anna Massey obituary | Culture | The Guardian

Michael Billington
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 July 2011



Anna Massey, who has died of cancer aged 73, made her name on the stage as a teenager in French-window froth. She then graduated, with effortless and extraordinary ease, to the classics and to the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and David Hare. In later years, she became best known for her award-winning work in television and film. What constantly impressed was her fastidious intelligence and capacity for stillness: always the mark of a first-rate actor.

Born in Thakeham, West Sussex, she was bred into show business although, in personal terms, that proved something of a mixed blessing. Her father was Raymond Massey, a Canadian actor who achieved success in Hollywood; her mother was Adrianne Allen who had appeared in the original production of Noël Coward's Private Lives. Anna's godfather was the film director John Ford.

Since her father fled the family home when she was a child and her mother prided herself on being a lavish hostess, the young Anna relied heavily on the family nanny for emotional comfort. There was an air of resonant solitude about many of her best performances that may have stemmed from her childhood.

She had a privileged upbringing and a peripatetic education in Europe and the US. Although never formally trained as an actor, she made a strikingly confident debut at the age of 17 in a William Douglas-Home trifle, The Reluctant Debutante. Playing the obstinate, sweetly peevish daughter of troubled, upper-class parents (Celia Johnson and Wilfrid Hyde-White), she captured many of the notices and was praised by the critic Ivor Brown for displaying "a nice, down-to-earth determination". The play had a long run at the Cambridge theatre in 1955 before moving to New York.

For a while it looked as if Massey would be trapped in a series of evanescent comedies. Returning to London from New York, she went straight into another lightweight piece, Dear Delinquent. But proof that Massey had set her sights somewhat higher came in 1958 when she appeared in TS Eliot's classically influenced verse drama The Elder Statesman, prompting Kenneth Tynan to remark that "Anna Massey, of the beseeching face and shining eyes, is a first-rate stand-in for Antigone". She demonstrated that she could carry a show when, in 1961, she played Annie Sullivan, the persistent and faintly sadistic teacher of an undisciplined, disabled girl in William Gibson's The Miracle Worker.

After that the lead roles came pouring in. She was Lady Teazle in John Gielgud's elegant, starry Haymarket revival of The School for Scandal in 1962, in which her brother, Daniel, also appeared. She returned to the same theatre in 1963 to play Jennifer Dubedat in George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma and again in 1965 to play the fragile Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. In 1966, she took over from Vanessa Redgrave as Muriel Spark's mind-bending dominie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Wyndham's theatre.

Combining delicate beauty with a hint of inner steel, she could have continued as an archetypal West End leading lady. But a major shift in her career occurred in 1971 when she went to the Royal Court to appear in David Hare's Slag, which showed three female teachers resolving to abstain from sex: as the eldest of the three, full of old school ties and sporting inclinations, she was unnervingly funny. She was equally good as the arrogantly colonialist Lady Utterword in Shaw's Heartbreak House at the Old Vic in 1975, and even appeared, heroically, as one of three figures encased in urns in Beckett's Play at the Royal Court in 1976.

She had come a long way from the boulevard divertissements of her youth. And if, in later years, her stage appearances became regrettably fewer, they were all memorable. I have never forgotten how, in Pinter's A Kind of Alaska at the National in 1982, she and Paul Rogers reacted to the reawakening of Judi Dench's victim of sleeping sickness with an amazed, compassionate stillness.

No less treasurable was her performance as Bel in Pinter's Moonlight at the Almeida in 1993. Patiently tolerant with her raging husband, she registered pure hollow-eyed despair when her estranged sons rejected her pleading telephone call. When she played Elizabeth I to Isabelle Huppert's Mary Stuart in Friedrich Schiller's historical drama at the National in 1996, she was flawless in her aching sense of regal solitude.

She was appointed CBE for services to drama in 2005 and, in the following year, published an autobiography, Telling Some Tales. Massey was a consummate actor and, in my one brief encounter with her, sitting next to her at a Canadian ambassadorial dinner, a delightful woman. I remember we spent much of the evening discussing her passion for televised snooker. That seemed to symbolise the fact that, in her career as well as her life, she was always capable of the unexpected.

She married the actor Jeremy Brett in 1958. The marriage was dissolved in 1963. In 1988 she married Uri Andres, a Russian metallurgist at London's Imperial College. She is survived by Uri; her son, David, from her first marriage; and two grandchildren.








Ronald Bergan writes: Michael Powell's lurid Peeping Tom (1960) provided Anna Massey with her second, and most significant, film role in a 50-year career on screen. Massey gave a wonderfully sympathetic performance as the naive downstairs neighbour of a psychotic landlord (Karlheinz Böhm) whom she finds both repellent and attractive. More often, Massey, with her cut-glass English accent, conveyed a cold and repressed character on screen.

She had made her feature film debut aged 21 in Ford's uncharacteristic Gideon's Day (1958) as the daughter of a Scotland Yard inspector played by Jack Hawkins. In Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), she was a nervous teacher. In 1969, she seemed content to play Anthony Hopkins's frustrated wife in The Looking Glass War and, in De Sade, a plain-looking woman married to the naughty marquis (Keir Dullea), while he romps around with her sexy sister.

In Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), she was strangled by the "Neck-Tie Murderer", bundled into a sack full of potatoes and thrown on to a moving truck. Somehow it was as if Hitch wanted to make amends for her being spared from death in Peeping Tom.

The following year, in an episode entitled Midnight Mess from the portmanteau film Vault of Horror (1973), she was murdered by her brother (played by her real-life sibling Daniel) for her inheritance, although she turns out to be a vampire who serves her murderer tomato juice in a restaurant which happens to be his blood. By way of contrast, she also appeared that year, with Hopkins and Claire Bloom, in A Doll's House, adapted from Henrik Ibsen's play.

Variously cast in roles such as nannies, nuns and nurses, Massey starred in dozens of British and American films, including The Importance of Being Earnest (as Miss Prism, 2002) and Possession (2002) and, in particular, television productions, which were far more rewarding. The most prominent of these were literary adaptations which offered roles such as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1964), Lucetta in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), a creepy Mrs Danvers in Rebecca (1979), Aunt Norris in Mansfield Park (1983) and Miss Pross in A Tale of Two Cities (1989). Massey also had parts in the TV series The Pallisers (1974), Couples (1976), The Diamond Brothers (1991) and Midsomer Murders (1998, 2009) and as Lady Thatcher, opposite Derek Jacobi, in Pinochet in Suburbia (2006).

Perhaps her greatest triumph on television was her Bafta-winning performance as the lonely crime writer on holiday in Switzerland in Hotel du Lac (1986), Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Anita Brookner's novel. It was the sort of role in which Massey was supreme: placid on the surface, with passion deep within her.

Anna Raymond Massey, actor, born 11 August 1937; died 3 July 2011

[Edward G]

A sad passing.
Windthrop - thanks for the extensive Telegraph obituary.
I had no idea she had led such an unpredictable life.
As an actress she had an allure about her - a quiet strength.
Can't really describe it properly.

[dpgmel]

Oh gosh, sad sad news indeed.
R I P Ms M.

[Onedin]

Only last week I saw her as Prof. Margaret Gold in the 'Lewis' episode 'Whom the gods would destroy'.


Rest in peace, Anna. hatsoff2.gif

[didi-5]

A very classy lady and a great actress. She seems to have been very much respected in her industry and outside of it, dealt with the problems of her life with fortitude and compassion, particularly in relation to her first husband with whom she remained great friends to the end of his life, without being in any way judgemental or bitter. That deserves a lot of respect, IMO.

My favourite performances of Anna's were Hotel du Lac, Frenzy, Peeping Tom, Rebecca (as Mrs Danvers) and, much later, various deranged appearances in the likes of Midsomer Murders. On radio she was a delight in Man and Superman and many other plays.

Not to mention the fact that her autobiography is a very well-written and honest piece of work which I very much enjoyed reading.

[mrs_emma_peel]

Shocking news ...
I was listening to Anna just very recently on BBC Radio4 Extra narrating from her book Telling Some Tales about her film career and her work and roles in two cult-classic films Peeping Tom (1960) and Frenzy (1972).

Anna talked about her experiences working with Michael Powell on Peeping Tom and about working with Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Frenzy and about the art of acting. And later about how she was in love with Denholm Elliott and loved working with him on location in Switzerland on the superb BBC television film Hotel du Lac (1986) for which she won Best Actress BAFTA.
A very gifted actress and lovely lady.
RIP Anna Massey
Emma

[Windyridge]

Just seen her in "Moving On" and thanks to a kind forum member, linked to her reading her memoirs at the Beeb. RIP Anna.