“I’ve been ill used by my screen husbands, rotters to a man,” said Anne Stallybrass, who became known in the 1970s for playing what she called “long-suffering historical ladies”. First among them was Jane Seymour in the Six Wives of Henry VIII, whom she portrayed as shy and introverted but devoted to the king.
Stallybrass gained an even bigger profile with The Onedin Line, a saga of 19th-century seafaring, which became a Sunday evening fixture for much of the 1970s. She took the role of the headstrong Anne Webster, who marries Peter Gilmore’s bluff sea captain and entrepreneur, James Onedin, even though Stallybrass was scared of the sea and knew that much of the filming would be done on board ship.
“I had a dread of falling overboard,” she later said. “The costumes were so weighty that I was convinced I would drown, but everyone assured me that with all those petticoats, I’d have floated. At least they kept me warm, but I took off the whalebone corset because it was so terribly uncomfortable when I walked up and down the deck. The clothes must have been hell for women in those days.”
Another fear played on her mind, that if she continued to act in costume dramas, her reputation for playing overdressed, underappreciated wives would constrict her career as tightly as any corset. The scriptwriters told her that if she wanted to rest, she could be written out of the script for a while and then return, but she insisted that she wished to leave. At the end of the second series Anne Webster died in childbirth and Stallybrass made her escape. “Looking back, I suppose it was quite a courageous decision,” she said. “I’m not at all sure I’d do the same thing now.”
The roles that followed actually stuck close to her established type. In The Strauss Family, a 1972 television series about the dynasty of composers, she played Maria Anna, the wife of Johann Strauss I who endured his serial infidelities, and in a 1978 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge she played her most persecuted heroine, Susan Henchard, who dies prematurely after being sold at auction for five guineas.
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“I have had enough of long-suffering terribly nice ladies,” she confessed to one interviewer. “One does get bored with being such a good person all the time. It would be lovely to play a loud, brassy barmaid instead of all these repressed wives.”
Jacqueline Anne Stallybrass was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, in 1938 to Annie (née Peacock) and Edward, who worked for the Bank of England. Both were keen amateur dramatists. From an early age Anne was determined to become an actress, an ambition which her father worried would not lead to stable work, but which her mother encouraged, having wanted to be an actress herself.
She was also encouraged by her teachers at St Bernard’s Convent in Westcliff, where Helen Mirren was a fellow pupil. Stallybrass played King Herod to Mirren’s shepherd boy in a nativity play. After training at the Royal Academy of Music, where she won the drama gold medal, she began her professional career in repertory.
Her first job was assistant stage manager with the Arthur Brough Players at the Leas Pavilion in Folkestone, Kent, where the audience would have afternoon tea while watching the matinee. “In the third act they handed their trays back and paid the bills,” she recalled. “Of course, it suited some plays more than others. Joan burning at the stake, for instance, had her work cut out.”
Stallybrass made her debut in the farce Rookery Nook and her first lead was Jo in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. In Pools Paradise she played opposite Roger Rowland, who became her first husband in 1963. After 18 months with the Arthur Brough Players Stallybrass moved to the Nottingham Playhouse, playing in Shakespeare, Ibsen and Pinter. Later she described it as “ridiculous” that she played Shakespeare’s Cleopatra at only 23, but added, “at that age you take anything, blind”.
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By this time she was well established on television. She made her debut in an episode of the hospital series Emergency Ward 10 in 1964 and the following year played Rosemary in George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. There followed a long dry spell in the late 1960s when she took a clerk’s job with the Midland Bank in the City. Then she was offered the part of Jane Seymour. Her roles as Anne Onedin and Maria Anna Strauss brought her best actress nominations from the Society of Film and Television Arts (later Bafta).
In 1981 she made a rare excursion into sitcom, playing a free-spirited divorcée in Misfits but it lasted only one series. More successful was Flying Lady in which she was a shrewish wife horrified that her husband had blown his redundancy money on a Rolls-Royce.
In 1993 she played the Queen in the American-made miniseries Diana: Her True Story, based on the book by Andrew Morton. As a fervent monarchist she had misgivings about taking the role but it was a family joke that she bore a resemblance to the Queen and when she went for the interview she did her hair in the monarch’s style.
After her marriage to Rowland ended in divorce, Stallybrass lived with Gilmore, her leading man from The Onedin Line, and after ten years together they married in 1987. Gilmore died in 2013. She was unable to have children but described that as “something I have learnt to live with. I take great joy in my three godchildren and have kept in contact with all the ‘television children’ I have had.”
Anne Stallybrass, actress, was born on December 4, 1938. She died of natural causes on July 3, 2021, aged 82