Versatile actress who starred in A Room with a View

When Rosemary Leach applied Rosemary to Rada, she was so shy she Leach kept her back to the examiners 1935-2017 during her audition, said The Times. To her surprise, she was admitted nonetheless, and spent three unhappy years at the drama college. In her leaving report, her tutors said that she had “no technique”. Yet Leach, who has died aged 81, became one of Britain’s most ubiquitous actresses. “At the peak of her career, she was so in demand that it became a joke among the ranks of Equity members that ‘if Rosemary Leach is out of work, you know that television must be in a bad way’.”

The daughter of two teachers from Shropshire, Leach had only applied to Rada on a whim: until her sister showed her a magazine article about it, she’d planned to study art. Her contemporaries included the likes of Alan Bates and Peter O’toole. But on leaving, she felt she’d learnt so little, she ended up selling shoes at John Lewis. It was working at Caryl Jenner’s mobile theatre for children that changed everything. “I suddenly learnt how to do it,” she said. That led to jobs in rep, and then, in 1962, her first TV role in Z-cars. Over the next 20 years, she appeared in a slew of notable series, said The Guardian: she was Patrick Wymark’s lover in The Power Game (1965-66), Aunt Fenny in The Jewel in the Crown (1984), and the widow who falls for Nigel Havers’s conman in The Charmer (1987).

Able to move effortlessly between comedy and drama, and across the class divide, she appeared in several sitcoms (including No – That’s Me Over Here! with Ronnie Corbett), and received two of her five Bafta nominations playing Mrs Honeychurch in Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View (1985) and David Essex’s mother in the rock’n’roll movie That’ll Be the Day (1973). In 1981, on a rare break from TV, she starred as Helene Hanff in a stage adaptation of 84, Charing Cross Road – and won an Olivier. It was to her regret that she was not considered for more stage work. In 2012, she told an interviewer that she’d never been invited to appear either with the National Theatre or with the RSC, though she had auditioned. “I’m as good as Judi Dench, I’m sure I am,” she added. On other occasions, she suggested that perhaps she had done “one too many of those Ronnie Corbett sitcoms”.

Although married to actor Colin Starkey, she was not comfortable with publicity. She didn’t even like being recognised in the street. “Some actors love it,” she said. “I just want to crawl into a hole.”