When Charlton Heston was looking for a star regal enough to play opposite his Mark Antony in the 1972 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra — which he also directed — his first choice for the part was Diana Rigg. She turned him down. The problem was that whoever was brave enough to take on the role of the Egyptian queen would be doing so after Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor, Hollywood giants who had made the role their own on the silver screen.
In the end Heston settled felicitously on Hildegard Neil, who had established herself as one of the most desirable actresses of the day after playing Roger Moore’s wife in Basil Dearden’s 1970 thriller The Man Who Haunted Himself and had the further qualification of having just spent a season with the RSC.
Neil threw herself into the part with a consuming dedication. “My life is calm, reserved, stable but unfortunately, Cleopatra’s was anything but that,” she said. “I had to search out the other side of my nature, the dark side, and stretch it. Such sensuality as I have and what temperament I have, I worked on and exaggerated to breaking point.”
Although the film got mixed reviews and did not break any records at the box office, Neil was one of its stand-out successes with a portrayal that was every bit as beguiling and seductive as Taylor or Colbert. Variety, the American trade magazine, praised her effusively for “one of Cleo’s more convincing screen incarnations”.
After Moore and Heston she went on to be the leading lady to George Segal, playing his wife in the Oscar-nominated 1973 film A Touch Of Class, and to Peter Finch, whose lover she played that same year in Peter Duffell’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s England Made Me. However, her true “leading man” was Brian Blessed, to whom she was married for 45 years. They met in 1969 when they appeared in a television drama, Double Agent, in ITV’s Playhouse series. However, both were married at the time and their romance did not take off until they were cast together again in Yorkshire TV’s 1974 children’s series Boy Dominic set in the years after the Napoleonic wars.
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Neil played the widow of a naval captain who moves with her son Dominic to Yorkshire to run a boarding house with a drunken sailor, played by Blessed, who had served under her late husband at the Battle of Trafalgar.
The attraction between them was obvious to everyone else on the set but, according to Blessed, in the four months they spent filming together they “didn’t even hold hands”. When he finally plucked up the courage to kiss her he claimed that it required more courage than it later took him to climb Everest.
“Do you know, I have never met a primitive before?” Neil told him. When he looked crestfallen she added, “Don’t be upset Brian, I’m praising you.”
They celebrated the start of their relationship with dinner in a Harrogate restaurant and when they barely touched the food, the head waiter asked if there was something wrong with the food. “We’re so in love we can’t eat!” Blessed blurted out.
The romance was cemented with a holiday in Cape Town, where Neil had grown up, and their daughter was born soon after. They married in 1978 and became a family business, often appearing together.
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On stage Neil played Eleanor of Aquitaine to Blessed’s Henry II in The Lion in Winter and when he played Lear in a 1999 film version of Shakespeare’s play, which he also co-directed, she was cast as the king’s Fool. She took an obvious relish in telling the “very foolish fond old man” played by her husband some hard-hitting home truths.
When Blessed made his stage directorial debut in 2016 with Agatha Christie’s The Hollow at The Mill at Sonning, his wife and their daughter Rosalind Blessed were in the cast.
“I used to travel around theatres with Mum and watch her, so she really became my hero,” Rosalind remembered. “My parents always said they didn’t mind what on earth I did as long as I was happy and it transpired that I was happiest knocking around in a theatre.”
Neil fretted with concern when Blessed took off on his boy’s own adventures, which included three attempts to climb Everest and becoming the oldest man to reach the magnetic North Pole on foot. Yet she knew better than to try to stop him. “My wife is very practical. She doesn’t quite understand why I’m doing it but I think she secretly admires it,” he said.
Neil is survived by her husband and daughter and a kennel full of dogs that she was often seen walking in the woods around their home in the picturesque Surrey village of Windlesham. Her first two marriages, to Barry Wenn in 1961 and John Cartmel-Crossley in 1971, ended in divorce.
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She was born Hildegard Hope Zimmermann in 1939 in Cape Town, the daughter of Josephine (née Seddon) and Carl Zimmermann, a police superintendent. After leaving school she worked as a library assistant and a secretary before moving to London in 1961 to train at Rada, where she won the Emile Littler award. On graduating in 1963 she took the stage name Neil and spent the rest of the decade in regional repertory, including three years at the Everyman theatre on Merseyside. It was there she became a lifelong follower of Liverpool FC.
Possessed of striking looks with startling grey-green eyes and raven hair, she settled naturally into heavyweight roles from Shakespeare to Ibsen. “I was never a juvenile and couldn’t play the dizzy blonde,” she observed. “I’ve been trading in a certain maturity since I was about ten.”
By the end of the 1960s she had joined the RSC and was picking up regular television work. Over the years there were character parts in such popular shows as Dixon Of Dock Green, Jason King and The Professionals.
Her biggest film roles all came in the 1970s but it was the stage where she felt most at home.
Hildegard Neil, actress, was born on May 20, 1939. She died of cancer on September 19, 2023, aged 84