HILDEGARD NEIL
(20 May 1939 - 19 September 2023)
The English actress Hildegard Neil, who was born in South Africa, but moved to London in 1961, has died aged 84. She was formerly a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as having a long career on TV and in films. She was an imposing figure who always stood out in anything she played – serious, believable and indeed a very good actress. Her TV debut came in 1963 as Calpurnia in the BBC Schools production of Julius Caesar. After that she was in much TV including the children’s series, Boy Dominic (1974), with a cast that included Brian Blessed, her future husband. They had already worked together in 1969 in ITV Playhouse’s Double Agent.
Hildegard Neil was born Hildegard Zimmermann in Cape Town to police superintendent Carl Zimmermann and his wife Josephine. On arriving in the UK, she went to Rada and won the Emile Littler Award. Now called Hildegard Neil, she joined many reps before joining the RSC in London for Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.
Hildegard Neil’s first film was Basil Dearden’s thriller The Man Who Haunted Himself (1971) with Roger Moore in his favourite role, a man whose personality changes overnight. Neil played his wife, an auspicious debut. She made a very creditable Queen of Egypt in Charlton Heston’s film of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1972), in which Heston was Mark Antony. It was good but flopped commercially. Then Neil was wife to George Segal in the hit comedy A Touch of Class (1973) with Oscar-winning Glenda Jackson as the ‘other’ woman. In the same year Neil played the wife of Michael York in England Made Me, Peter Duffell’s drama based on the Graham Greene novel. The Legacy (1978) was Richard Marquand’s horror film with Katharine Ross, Sam Elliott and Roger Daltrey, but it was poorly received. Neil was in the film-within-a-film part of Guy Hamilton’s Agatha Christie tale, The Mirror Crack’d (1980), with Elizabeth Taylor as part of a Hollywood company filming in Miss Marple’s home village. After that Neil mainly worked on TV.
She called Brian Blessed a ‘primitive’ man for his passion for mountaineering, space training and Polar trekking. They married in 1978, and have a daughter, the actress Rosalind Blessed. Both had married before, Neil to Barry Wenn and John Cartmel-Crossley. Blessed had married the actress and Egyptologist Ann Bomann and they had a daughter, Catherine, but later divorced. Neil and Blessed lived in Surrey with an extensive menagerie of animals.
MICHAEL DARVELL