THE character actress Hilary Mason’s dominant plainness helped her to create a formidable gallery of villainesses and eccentric spinsters in the cinema and on television, but it was her role as the eerie blind psychic, Heather, in Nicholas Roeg’s classic 1973 supernatural chiller, Don’t Look Now, that brought her international acclaim.
The film, adapted from a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, featured Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, who after the shockingly unexpected death of their small daughter, move to Venice where they encounter two elderly sisters, one of whom (Mason) claims to be in touch with the dead daughter’s spirit. Widely regarded as a masterpiece of modern horror, the film is particularly notable for Mason’s astonishing performance as the near-hysterical psychic who draws Sutherland and Christie into a terrifying labyrinth of cryptic signs and doom-laden portents.
Although Mason was equally adept at playing comedy, she was, unsurprisingly, cast in several other horror films such as Dolls (1987), Afraid of the Dark (1991) and Haunted (1995), with John Gielgud and Anthony Hopkins.
Hilary Lavender Mason was born in London in 1917 and trained for the stage at the London School of Dramatic Art, then under the auspices of Gertrude Pickersgill, one of the foremost exponents of mime in the UK. After graduating she took work as a shorthand typist and appeared in repertory around the country and in small parts in the West End.
Television was to become her forte and she appeared in several dramas recorded live in the late Fifties before becoming a regular face in series such as Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green and Paul Temple. She played Mrs Timothy in the early BBC soap United! (1965) and in 1970 was Lady Boleyn in The Six Wives of Henry VIII, opposite Keith Michell.
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Her first taste of the horror genre came in 1975 when she played Mrs Hyde opposite Joan Collins in the irresistibly trashy I Don’t Want to be Born but she was on more respectable ground when she appeared as Mrs Roberts in Edward the King (1975) with Timothy West, and Miss Hayward in The Duchess of Duke Street (1976).
No stranger to Dickens, she was a splendid Mrs Gummidge in a TV adaptation of David Copperfield (1986) and she played Mrs Fagge in Great Expectations (1989), opposite Jean Simmons.
Long remembered by fans of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976), starring Leonard Rossiter, Mason appeared in the first series as landlady Mrs Deacon, who famously said to a tenant: “You’re coloured, aren’t you? You can’t expect us to face Mecca while we’re having our tea.”
In 1994 Mason appeared as Gladys in several episodes of the children’s comedy series Maid Marian and her Merry Men. Her last work for television included Where the Heart Is and Aquila (both 1997).
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Hilary Mason, actress, was born on September 4, 1917. She died on September 5, 2006, aged 89.