Faith Brook was born into a family of actors in York, but she spent much of her childhood in Hollywood as the film career of her father Clive Brook took off at Paramount Pictures during the exciting early days of sound. She got a close-up of stardom when he took on the mantle of Sherlock Holmes in several films and shared top billing with Marlene Dietrich on Shanghai Express (1932).
Following in her father’s footsteps, Faith pursued a career as an actress on both sides of the Atlantic. She never quite became a star, but appeared in more than 100 films and television shows and went on working in theatre into her eighties.
She appeared in films from the early 1940s and had significant supporting parts in the 1959 film of The 39 Steps and in the schoolroom drama To Sir, With Love (1967). On television she played Countess Rostova in the BBC adaptation of War and Peace (1972-73) and had recurring roles in Angels (1975-76) and The Irish RM (1983-84).
On stage she worked with Alec Guinness, who was a friend with whom she went on theatre outings, Michael Redgrave and Ian McKellen. She and McKellen appeared in a 1971 production of Hamlet, both in the West End and on tour. McKellen played the Prince, while Brook’s boozy Gertrude was regarded by some as the definitive 20th-century interpretation of the role of Hamlet’s mother.
Brook’s father was already established as a silent movie star in Britain when Faith was born in 1922. Her mother also acted. Her brother Lyndon was born four years later and he too became an actor. By the time of his birth, however, the family had moved to California, where Clive Brook’s career spanned the silent and sound eras.
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He worked on several silent films in Britain with the young Alfred Hitchcock. Eventually Hitchcock too moved to Hollywood and Faith made her screen debut in his film Suspicion in 1941, competing with Joan Fontaine for the attentions of Cary Grant. She also appeared in Zoltan Korda’s 1942 live- action adaptation of The Jungle Book.
In the latter years of the Second World War she enlisted in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), and appeared in a production of the Terence Rattigan play Flare Path that toured military bases in the Adriatic.
After the war she returned to Britain and worked in theatre for several years, playing Olivia in a production of Twelfth Night directed by Alec Guinness in 1948. They worked together again two years later in the original Broadway production of T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.
Brook married a doctor in the US and during the early 1950s she appeared regularly on American television. But the marriage ended in divorce and she was back in Britain by the end of the decade, playing the spy whose murder in Richard Hannay’s flat sets the ball rolling in the remake of The 39 Steps with Kenneth More as John Buchan’s gentleman adventurer.
However, it was probably in theatre and television that she enjoyed her greatest and most sustained success, reaching a wide public in War and Peace, the medical soap Angels, The Irish RM, in which she played Lady Knox, and Gentlemen and Players (1988-89), a drama series set in the business world. Her patrician bearing lent itself fairly readily to aristocrats and figures of authority.
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In the Roger Moore film North Sea Hijack (1979) her performance as a woman Prime Minister mirrored Margaret Thatcher’s arrival at No 10; she was in The Razor’s Edge (1984), with Bill Murray an unlikely casting as Somerset Maugham’s protagonist; and she played Lady Bexborough in a big-screen adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1997), with Vanessa Redgrave.
In 1999 Brook won the Clarence Derwent Award for best supporting actress in the West End for her performance as Charles Dance’s mother in Good at the Donmar Warehouse.
Despite failing sight, she went on working. She received glowing notices for The Colour of Poppies, a one- woman show looking at sex and love from an elderly perspective. She performed the show in London and on tour from 2005 to 2008. She also played the mother-in-law in the production of Uncle Vanya that opened the Rose Theatre in Kingston upon Thames in 2008.
She is survived by a son from a second marriage which also ended in divorce.
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Faith Brook, actress, was born on February 16, 1922. She died on March 11, 2012, aged 90