FREDA DOWIE

(22 July 1928 - 10 August 2019)

The British character actress Freda Dowie, who has died aged 91, was brilliant at playing ordinary but not always happy women with sad lives. She was outstanding as the Mother in Terence Davies’ film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) which the director based on his own Liverpool childhood. Dowie’s performance at the hands of her abusive husband (Pete Postlethwaite) was a moving portrayal of a brutally wasted life. It won her a nomination in the European Film Awards. Her long, fifty-year career was full of such real performances, mostly on television. She was in many TV series, seemingly born to appear in classic, period dramas such as Doctor Faustus, Antigone, The Bacchae, Maupassant, North and South, Cranford (1972), I, Claudius, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Pickwick Papers, Alice in Wonderland, Middlemarch, and two TV versions of Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie. However, she was equally at home with modern drama such as Doomwatch, Crown Court, Angels, Lovejoy, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Our Friends in the North, The Bill, Heartbeat and EastEnders, etc. She had a select roster of feature films including Subterfuge (1968) with Gene Barry and Joan Collins, The Omen (as a nun), Francisco Lara Polop’s The Monk (as another nun), Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss and also his Jude, Dan Zeff’s Black Eyes (as Gran), and Jaume Balaguero’s Fragile (2005) with Calista Flockhart. Freda Dowie was divorced from her first husband, John Goodrich. From 1970 she was married to the writer-producer-director David Thompson.

MICHAEL DARVELL