Rosemary Anne Sisson
Doyenne of television scriptwriters whose hits included Upstairs Downstairs and The Irish RM
ROSEMARY ANNE SISSON, who has died aged 96, was one of Britain’s finest writers of nostalgic period drama, her credits including popular television series such as Upstairs Downstairs, which held audiences spellbound for four years during the 1970s with its tales of the Edwardian Bellamy family and their servants.
She wrote 11 episodes of the award-winning programme and was involved in many more, and contributed scripts to numerous other classic television productions, including the Catherine of Aragon episode of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, “The Marriage Game” in Elizabeth R, Follyfoot, The Duchess of Duke Street, The Bretts and A Town Like Alice.
A born storyteller, she was also a pioneer of the 1980s “miniseries”. With Agnes Nixon, creator of the longrunning American soap opera All My Children, she wrote The Manions of America, a saga following a 19thcentury family (headed on screen by Pierce Brosnan and Kate Mulgrew) in its ascent from poverty in Ireland to eminence in America. The six-hour series was first broadcast over three evenings on the ABC network in the United States in 1981. Rosemary Anne Sisson’s involvement was the result of her established reputation for Upstairs Downstairs, a huge hit on US public television’s “Masterpiece Theatre” strand.
One of two sisters, Rosemary Anne Sisson was born at Enfield, Middlesex, on October 13 1923 to CJ Sisson, a scholar of Shakespeare, and his wife Vera (née Ginn). She attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she discovered a passionate love of literature. This in turn transformed into a strong desire to be an actress – although that was never to be.
Her yearning for the stage led her to read English at University College, London, but her studies were interrupted by the war. “I volunteered for the WAAFS and spent two years spotting aircraft over the channel for the RAF and then went back to finish my degree,” she recalled in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “But I felt so ancient after the war – I was 21 or 22 – that I felt defeated and beaten. We had had V-E Day, then V-J Day and then we came out and thought: ‘We won!’ and this was the big disappointment. We found we were poor, starving, houses destroyed. Really, really hungry. It features enormously in my personal history.”
Salvation came in the form of a job at the University of Wisconsin, where she took on the task of introducing former GIS to the joys of English literature. The course she taught sprawled from Beowulf to Matthew Arnold.
Back in Britain, having graduated from UCL, she completed an Mlitt at Newnham College, Cambridge. She lectured at UCL from 1950 to 1954 and at the University of Birmingham from 1954 to 1955. At this point her father was appointed to the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-avon, where she got a job as drama critic at the Stratford Herald for a couple of years, providing her with the ideal way to indulge her taste for theatre.
“I met actors for the first time,” she remembered. “I saw all the history plays with Richard Burton as Prince Hal – and you cannot imagine what the effect of Richard was on impressionable young women. When I got to the end of Henry V I thought – ‘What happened next?’ So I went to Holinshed and I found there this wonderful story of Henry the Fifth’s widow falling in love with Owen Tudor.”
She wrote the play herself, in iambic pentameters, and after several rewrites The Queen and the Welshman was put on and became a runaway success at the Edinburgh fringe. The Daily Telegraph’s WA Darlington praised the author’s “keen nose for stories that are both true to actuality and to stage affect”.
The production introduced her to a group of actors, including Edward Woodward, who played Owen Tudor, and Frank Finlay (the Gaoler), with whom she remained lifelong friends. The play did not receive a West End run, however, though it was put on at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and she would soon became disillusioned with London theatre.
Writing in the Telegraph in 1963, she complained that “the sort of play which the vast majority of playgoers like … is simply not acceptable to West End theatres of today”. She would eventually see one of her plays performed in the West End, when her comedy A Ghost on Tiptoe, written with her friend Robert Morley, had a run at the Savoy Theatre in 1974.
Meanwhile, a letter from a Welsh
producer asking her permission to adapt The Queen and the Welshman for television was probably intended to elicit a simple agreement, but instead Rosemary Anne Sisson went to John Wiles, who was writing the adaptation, and sat next to him asking questions about his craft.
This crash course paid off and soon she was writing historical dramas for both the BBC and ITV. Through the 1970s and 1980s she turned out countless original scripts as well as adaptations such as The Irish RM, starring Peter Bowles and based on the books by Somerville and Ross, and The Wind in the Willows.
Her work for British television was noticed by Hollywood and she also found herself in increasing demand across the Atlantic. She embarked on an association with Disney which was to last for several years.
Among her adventure films for Disney were Ride a Wild Pony (1975);
Escape from the Dark (featuring Alastair Sim in his final role, 1976);
Candleshoe (with David Niven and a very young Jodie Foster, 1977);
Watcher in the Woods (co-written with Brian Clemens and Harry Spalding, 1980), and the cartoon fantasyadventure The Black Cauldron (1985). She also worked with George Lucas, in the 1990s, on The Young Indiana Jones
Chronicles for television. Production meetings in the US would usually end with an aeroplane journey back to London in order to write at her home in Parsons Green. But Hollywood was not without its charms: she relished the limousines, and occasional stays at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard.
Rosemary Anne Sisson wrote several novels for adults, such as The Excise Man (1972) and The Stratford Story (1975), and for children, including The Adventures of Ambrose (1951) and The Impractical Chimney Sweep (1956). In 1995 she published Rosemary for Remembrance, a collection of her poems and prose reflections.
She never married, explaining: “If I’d met the man I could have loved at any time up to the age of 30 I would have done it – I would have loved to have had children. But I read a poem which said: ‘In my thirtieth year came all my spirit home to me.’ And I remember thinking – Yes. I’m settled now. I feel at home with myself.”
Nevertheless, she was a devoted aunt, great aunt and godmother to her sister’s family, and took care of both her parents until their deaths – her mother at the age of 100 in 1996.
For more than 30 years she worked with the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. She was co-chairman in 1979-80 and president in 1995 for three years. The screenwriter Ian Curteis, who followed her in that role, recalled that she was instrumental in forging an agreement with the BBC about the level of involvement a writer has in a production after the delivery of their script.
“I’ve always thought of Rosemary as the Miss Marple of British playwriting,” he said. “She looked like everybody’s great aunt but then she wrote and out comes this incredible stuff you just wouldn’t expect. She was also an extremely practical woman who, when something really got her goat, would suddenly produce this torrent of anger. It was very effective.”
She was an honorary secretary of the Dramatists’ Club, whose members come together for a bi-annual lunch or dinner at the Garrick Club, and a member of Bafta from 1995. Among the accolades she received were the Laurel Award for service to writers and the Prince Michael of Kent Award, for services to the Soldiers, Sailors and Air Force Association.
This last was partly in response to her involvement over the years with scriptwriting for military tattoos, including the Royal Tournament, the VE Day 50th anniversary celebrations in Hyde Park and the Royal Military Tattoo 2000.
She carried on working into her nineties and was a frequent writer of letters to The Daily Telegraph. Completing the Telegraph general knowledge crossword was a weekend ritual for the past 20 years.
Known as Romy to her friends, she was a devoted Anglican who was involved with the Prayer Book Society and was a judge of the Cranmer Award for several years.
Through that duty she became friends with the thriller writer PD James, who remembered trips between London and the south coast, where Rosemary Anne Sisson had a holiday home. “I admired her greatly,” Baroness James said. “She was a good friend.”
Rosemary Anne Sisson, born October 13 1923, died July 28 2017