The acclaimed British classical actor Barbara Jefford, whose career spanned seven decades, has died at the age of 90. Her death on Saturday was announced by United Agents on behalf of her family. The statement called Jefford a “warm and generous woman, a sensational actress, and a dear friend who will be missed by many”.
The playwright Tanika Gupta, whose 2002 drama Sanctuary starred Jefford, was among those paying tribute. Gupta called her “a brilliant actor” who was also “great with new writing”.
Jefford was born in Devon and said that she knew as a young child she wanted to act. In an interview in 2000, she praised her elocution teacher and said: “Whenever I do poems in recitals I can still hear her advice, her instructions, her orders.” Soon after leaving Rada she arrived at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she played Isabella in Peter Brook’s 1950 production of Measure for Measure. It was the first of dozens of Shakespeare productions in her career. She portrayed Othello’s Desdemona, As You Like It’s Rosalind and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew among other roles in the early 50s before leaving Stratford.
She went on to appear at the Old Vic, the National Theatre and in New York as Ophelia and Lady Macbeth. In 1965 she was awarded an OBE for service to the theatre – the youngest ever recipient of the award. Decades later, she was Volumnia opposite Charles Dance’s Coriolanus in Stratford and played the same role opposite Ralph Fiennes as the Roman general in a London stage production. She also starred as Queen Margaret in Richard III, with Kenneth Branagh in the lead role, in Sheffield.
In a 2000 interview with the Guardian, Jefford reflected that “you can only play Shakespeare when you have reached a certain stage of technical expertise. So often you will see performances by very young actors who look divine, but then they open their little traps, and you think, ‘Oh dear.’” Shakespeare productions almost have to be age-blind, she suggested, “partly because no teenage actress could play, say, Juliet with any great acting expertise, and partly because the roles require some experience of life”. Jefford played Portia in The Merchant of Venice when she was in her 20s, 30s and 40s and said she had been better when she was older.
Her rich film career included Federico Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On, Stephen Frears’s Philomena, Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate and the Terence Davies adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea. She dubbed the voice for the seductive Tatiana Romanova, played on screen by Daniela Bianchi, in the 1963 James Bond adventure From Russia, With Love. Her mesmerising monologue as Molly Bloom, in Joseph Strick’s film of Ulysses, brought her a Bafta nomination in 1968.
In a tribute marking her 90th birthday earlier this year, the Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote that he first became aware of Jefford’s range when, in 1960, he saw her play Lady Macbeth, Saint Joan and “a crisply acidulous, very funny Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest” in a single week during an Old Vic tour to Oxford. He concluded: “There didn’t seem anything Jefford couldn’t play.”
