The concept of the classical actor is fast disappearing. If anyone deserves the title, however, it is Barbara Jefford who will be 90 on Sunday. In the course of an extraordinary 70-year career, Jefford has done her fair share of TV and film: on the big screen she was in Joseph Strick’s Ulysses, Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On, Stephen Frears’ Philomena. But classical theatre has long been Jefford’s forte and, if you look down her list of credits, it’s hard to find a major role she hasn’t played: she’s done all but four of Shakespeare’s plays as well as appearing in works by Racine, Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw and Pirandello. Why she has never been made a dame defeats me.
Jefford made a name for herself when young. At the age of 19, after graduating from Rada, she was cast as Isabella in Peter Brook’s 1950 Stratford Measure for Measure. If there is any modern Shakespeare production I wish I had seen, this would be it. TC Worsley praised Jefford for “freshness, a good presence, coolness and an excellent delivery”. But the great theatrical coup came in the final scene. Brook asked Jefford to hold for as long as possible the pause when Isabella decides whether or not to pardon John Gielgud’s Angelo. As Kenneth Tynan wrote at the time: “Those thirty-five seconds of dead silence were a long prickly moment of doubt which had every heart in the theatre thudding.”
I first saw Jefford a couple of years later when she took over as Rosalind in a Stratford As You Like It heading to Australia and New Zealand: my chief memory is of a witty and mercurial charmer. But I first became aware of Jefford’s range when in 1960, I saw her play three major roles in a single week during an Old Vic tour to Oxford’s New Theatre. On Monday, playing opposite her fellow Devonian Paul Rogers, she was a darkly intense Lady Macbeth. On Wednesday, she was Shaw’s Saint Joan: fervent, bright-eyed, brimming with faith and one of the best I’ve ever seen. On Saturday, she was a crisply acidulous, very funny Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. It is astonishing to think that we were once treated to such bountiful tours. I was equally struck by the fact that there didn’t seem anything Jefford couldn’t play.
Over the years she has run the gamut of the classical rep. Cleopatra, Phèdre, Hedda Gabler, Madame Arkadina: you name it, she’s played it. But what makes her so good? One insight came from one of her contemporaries who took over from her as Viola in an Old Vic Twelfth Night when Jefford headed off for an international tour. “Take good care of Viola won’t you,” urged Jefford, which suggests a loving protectiveness towards the characters she plays. Another insight emerged when I came across a review of Strick’s over-literal movie of Joyce’s Ulysses which talked of “Barbara Jefford’s majestic Molly Bloom making the obscenities sound really musical”. That instinctive musical response to language has coloured her whole career.
What is cheering is that age has not withered her. At 70 she played Volumnia – her second time in the role – to Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus at London’s Gainsborough studios: I’ve not forgotten how her forceful pleas to her son to abort his march on Rome ended in physical attack. Two years later she played Queen Margaret to Kenneth Branagh’s Richard III at the Sheffield Crucible: a performance of which Susannah Clapp wrote: “Barbara Jefford, one of the greatest of Shakespearean actors, brings a Grecian grandeur to the part.” I’d go along with that. In the course of a long career, Jefford has done contemporary drama and the inevitable small-screen policiers such as Midsomer Murders. But, as she celebrates her 90th birthday, I’d say she was a born classical actor with a touch of the sublime.
