Mary Miller
Prolific actress and founding member of the National Theatre
MARY MILLER, who has died aged 90, racked up more than 100 stage and small-screen appearances over a 50-year career; she was also one of the founding members of the National Theatre Company.
She was born Mary Elizabeth Spinks on December 27 1929 at Gorleston-on-sea in Norfolk. Her father was a port inspector, her mother a housewife; she grew up loving the cinema.
She enrolled at the Phyllis Adams School of Dance in Great Yarmouth but was determined to become an actress. Meanwhile she worked as a waitress at a coffee bar in Ipswich.
“If one believed the Hollywood fan magazines, such establishments were a hotbed of talent just aching to be discovered by famous producers”, she recalled in 2009. They tended not to be, but she was indeed spotted by the actor and director Peter Coe, and was soon onstage in rep.
In 1963 she was one of 77 performers – including Robert Stephens, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright and Michael Redgrave – to become founding members of the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic in its inaugural season under Sir Laurence Olivier. She went on to play Bianca to Olivier’s Othello.
By then she had appeared on the small screen in the historical series The Golden Spur (1959), which starred Oliver Reed as Richard of Gloucester, and the drama series The Younger Generation (1961), alongside such future luminaries as John Thaw, Frank Finlay and Johnny Briggs.
In the ensuing decade she made appearances in series such as Dixon of Dock Green, The Dick Emery Show, Jackanory, Marty Feldman’s
madcap sketch show Marty (alongside Tim Brooketaylor and John Junkin) and
Dr Finlay’s Casebook.
The titular Scots GP was played by Bill Simpson, and the two married in 1965, a few months after Mary Miller first appeared on the show (an earlier marriage, to Hugh Miller, had been dissolved). But by the time she returned for her second appearance in 1968 the marriage was on the rocks. The pair divorced in 1969.
Into the 1970s, she made several appearances as a QC in Crown Court, and was busy on stage, her productions including DH Lawrence’s The Merry-goround (1973, Royal Court). Three years later she was in Simon Gray’s bleak comedy Otherwise Engaged alongside Nigel Hawthorne and Alan Bates under the direction of Harold Pinter; she remained in the cast when the play moved to New York in 1977.
She returned to London for Lark Rise (1978) at the National, before joining the cast of The Birdwatcher (1979) at the Bristol Old Vic. She also taught at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art throughout the decade.
Having turned down the role of the icy Servalan in the sci-fi series Blakes 7 that went to Jacqueline Pearce, in 1981 she provided the voice (and Merle Park the moves) of Isadora Duncan for the Royal Ballet production of Kenneth Macmillan’s Isadora. With the RSC she appeared in productions including Melons (1985), and as Mrs Fezziwig at the Barbican in A Christmas Carol (1995).
Before that, in 1990 and 1995, she was in Eastenders as Joan Garwood, Frank Butcher’s (Mike Reid) estranged older and wiser sister who took their mother Mo (Edna Doré), from Albert Square to her home in Colchester in order to nurse her through Alzheimer’s. In 1997 she appeared in two episodes of Trial and Retribution, returning in 2005 to play her final role.
Mary Miller lived the last 11 years of her life surrounded by her peers at Denville Hall, the actors’ retirement home in Northwood, west London.