BARBARA LEIGH-HUNT
(14 December 1935 – 16 September 2024)
The English actress Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who has died aged 88, was a very fine performer with an impressive stage career and who also made wide-ranging appearances on television and graced around a dozen films. She made her debut on television in an episode of Callan in 1969 and her film debut in Hitchcock's Frenzy in 1972. Until then she had concentrated on her theatre work, generally being cast as strong, wilful women who would stand no nonsense. In that respect she was a fine Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, putting a new stamp on a part that Edith Evans had made her own. Leigh-Hunt worked with the best companies that British theatre could offer - the Bristol Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare and the National Theatre.
Barbara Leigh-Hunt was born in Bath, Somerset to Betty and Austin Leigh-Hunt, although her mother left the family and brought Barbara up by herself. She took her daughter to the theatre, where Barbara acquired her interest in the stage. She was, however, educated in London before returning to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, from where she graduated in 1953. She worked in repertory and with the Old Vic in London and on tour to the US and Canada, where she was in Hamlet, William Gillette's version of Sherlock Holmes and Galsworthy's Justice. She won Equity's Clarence Derwent Award for her role as Gertrude in Hamlet. Back in Bristol she was in classic plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Goldsmith and Coward. One production, Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head transferred to London. Joining the Royal Shakespeare Company gave her a chance of more experience in Shakespeare as well as modern works such as Tom Stoppard's Travesties. In some productions she appeared with her husband Richard Pasco who she married in 1967. At the National Theatre she was in plays by Tennessee Williams, Ben Jonson, Harley Granville-Barker and David Hare etc. She won an Olivier Award for her part in J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls.
In the cinema Leigh-Hunt enjoyed working with Hitchcock on her first film, Frenzy (1972). Despite the film's theme about a serial killer who frames another man for his murders, and the fact that Leigh-Hunt was one of his victims whom he rapes and strangles, the actress enjoyed Hitch's gentlemanly behaviour towards her. The scene with nudity was pretty savage, leaving nothing to the imagination, but a body double did the more harrowing shots. In the same year she played Catherine Parr in Waris Hussein's film Henry VIII and His Six Wives with Keith Michell as the King. More period drama for Leigh-Hunt when she played Catherine Matcham, sister to Lord Nelson (Peter Finch) in Rattigan's Bequest to the Nation, with Glenda Jackson as Lady Hamilton.
It's a fact that Leigh-Hunt was equally at home in both period and modern drama or comedy in whatever role she undertook, whether it be Lady Bracknell or Lady Catherine in a television production of Pride and Prejudice, or Hugh Whitemore's spy drama Pack of Lies or Charles Wood's Falkands TV drama Tumbledown, or Bertie and Elizabeth, Nigel Willliams' TV film about King George VI and the Queen Mother. She was perfectly at home in any role and was always at her best.
Other films she appeared in were Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Billy Elliot, The Martins and Mira Nair's adaptation of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (2004) in which she was Lady Bareacres. On TV she was in popular series such as The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Inspector Morse, As Time Goes By, Wives and Daughters, Kavanagh QC and Midsomer Murders. Barbara enjoyed touring with her husband Richard Pasco giving poetry readings. Sadly, he died in 2014. They had no children but Barbara became stepmother to William, Richard Pasco's son from his first marriage to actress Gwen Watson.
MICHAEL DARVELL