Jacqueline Pearce
Actress who played the villain Servalan in the series Blake’s 7
JACQUELINE PEARCE, who has died aged 74, was an actress best known for playing the imperious villain Servalan in the dystopian science fiction series Blake’s 7.
As Supreme Commander of the Terran Federation, Servalan was engaged in a relentless pursuit of Roj Blake (Garth Thomas) and his crew of renegades, idealists and malcontents on the Liberator spacecraft as they sought to bring down Servalan’s totalitarian empire.
She was initially engaged for a single episode in the first series, but she rapidly became the principal baddy, glamorous and deadly. One critic at the time described the series – devised by Doctor Who creator Terry Nation – as “a mix of oldeworlde space jargon, ray guns, Western-style goodies and baddies, and punch-ups straight out of The Sweeney”. Pearce herself described it as “Robin Hood in space – and I was King John”.
She was born on December 20 1943 at Woking in Surrey; her father, Reginald, worked for the aircraft manufacturers Vickers Armstrong. When she was less than two years old her mother, Stella, left, and she was brought up by her father and a family who rented part of the house. It was a disordered childhood, which gave her, she wrote, years of “mental turmoil”, and she underwent psychiatric treatment at several points in her life.
She was educated at the Marist Convent in West Byfleet. She hated it, but a lay teacher there uncovered her talent for drama, and she went on to Rada, following a few months at secretarial college.
At Rada she studied alongside Anthony Hopkins, and John Hurt, both of whom became friends. She was sent by the college for her first professional engagement, as a pantomime fairy in Coventry, directed by a young Trevor Nunn.
Her first role after leaving Rada was in a 1964 television play, Watch
Me, I’m a Bird, opposite Hurt, and Drewe Henley, who she had married the previous year. In 1965 she was in two Hammer horrors, The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile (in which she played the heavily made-up title role). Small television roles followed, in series such as The Avengers and Man in a Suitcase, then in 1967, after her husband had left her for Felicity Kendal, she decamped to the US, studying at the Actors Studio in Los Angeles and working as a receptionist for Sammy Davis Jr, whom she had met when he was working in Britain.
Back home, she played Jerry Lewis’s wife in the 1968 comedy Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River, and during the 1970s she was a staple of British TV drama, her roles including Rosa Dartle in the BBC’S David Copperfield (1974-75).
Blake’s 7 came to an end in 1981, though Pearce was denied a final flourish. “I felt that their decision not to have me in the last episode was made for personal, not professional, reasons,” she wrote of the BBC. “They felt threatened by me/servalan.”
After Blake’s 7 she was in several episodes of Doctor Who in 1985, and again in 2001-02. Her films included White Mischief (1987) and How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989).
On stage, her appearances included being directed by Harold Pinter in Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged (1975), and in 1999 she took a one-woman show, A Star Is Torn, to the Edinburgh Festival. Her last television work was in two 2006 episodes of Casualty.
In later years she lived in Lancashire. In 2012 she published a memoir, From
Byfleet to the Bush. In it she was candid about her mental health problems but had little to say about Blake’s 7: “Because I was more mad than sane… I have no fund of witty and amusing stories.”
Jacqueline Pearce and Drewe Henley divorced in 1967. A brief second marriage, to a teacher of transcendental meditation, also ended in divorce.
Jacqueline Pearce, born December 20 1943, died September 3 2018