JEAN MARSH
(1 July 1934 - 13 April 2025)
The English actress Jean Marsh, who has died at the age of 90 from complications of dementia, was a popular entertainer whose claim to fame lies largely in the fact that she co-created (with Eileen Atkins) the long-running television series Upstairs, Downstairs, in which she also played the parlour maid Rose Buck. There were fifty-four episodes of the series from 1971 to 1975, which became required Sunday night viewing for up to 18 million households. It was, arguably, the forerunner of Downton Abbey, proving that UK audiences relished period costume drama. The BBC’s The Forsyte Saga had already proved that nostalgia was a bankable deal in the schedules and Upstairs, Downstairs fitted the bill perfectly. It featured not only the aristocratic family Upstairs but also the servants Down Below. She won an Emmy in 1975 for ‘outstanding lead actress’.
Jean Marsh had been acting on film since 1947, was on television from 1952 and did theatre from 1959. She was born Jean Lyndsey Torren Marsh in north London to Henry Marsh, a printer, and his wife Emmeline, a parlour maid in a pub hotel, an inspiration for Rose Buck. As a child Jean became interested in acting, singing and dancing. She attended a charm school and became a model before working in repertory theatre. Her first film was Alberto Cavalcanti’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947), in which she was uncredited, and she was later cast in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone with Vivien Leigh and in Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, playing Octavia the Younger. She was in Charlie Bubbles with Albert Finney, with whom she had a relationship, and was Bertha in Jane Eyre (1970) with George C. Scott as Mr Rochester. She was also in Alfred Hitchcock’s last British film, Frenzy, and in John Sturges’ The Eagle Has Landed as a counterintelligence agent with Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland (qv). She then played Queen Bavmorda in Ron Howard’s Willow with Val Kilmer (qv) in 1988.
Apart from Upstairs, Downstairs, Jean Marsh made many other TV appearances, including in Danger Man, The Saint, Dr Who and The Persuaders, along with such American series as The Twilight Zone, The Waltons, Hawaii Five-0, Trapper John MD, 9 to 5, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote. The BBC’s revival of Upstairs, Downstairs in 2010–2012 was not successful, even with Marsh and Atkins in the cast, and the show was dropped. However, the two actresses also created another series, The House of Eliott, about a fashion company, and that did very well from 1991 to 1994.
Jean Marsh was a very good, versatile actress and writer and this was acknowledged when she was awarded an OBE for drama in 2012. She was married only once, to the actor Jon Pertwee in 1955 and they divorced in 1960. She had a long-term relationship with the actor Kenneth Haigh as well as an affair with Albert Finney. But her major relationship was with the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
MICHAEL DARVELL