Upstairs, Downstairs actor dared to speak publicly about her mental health battles

Nicola Pagett, who has died aged 75, was a stage and screen actress who dazzled millions of television viewers as Elizabeth Bellamy, a headstrong daughter of Edwardian aristocrats who grows up to become a militant suffragette in the acclaimed period drama Upstairs, Downstairs.

She died in a hospice near London after being diagnosed with brain cancer only three weeks earlier.

Pagett performed in plays by Harold Pinter, Shakespeare and Moliere – ‘‘great minds’’, she once said, ‘‘that rub off into your everyday life’’ – and had shared the stage with Vivien Leigh and

Alec Guinness by the time she turned 30. But she was best known for playing strongwilled aristocrats in TV shows that made her famous on both sides of the Atlantic.

As Elizabeth Bellamy, Pagett played a central role in early seasons of Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), which chronicled the decline of the British aristocracy by focusing on the Bellamy family and their servants. The show began in the Edwardian era and spanned nearly three decades, with characters fighting in World War I, drowning on the Titanic and losing their fortunes in the 1929 stock market crash.

Airing on ITV in Britain and on public television’s Masterpiece Theatre in the United States, Upstairs, Downstairs, attracted some 11 million American viewers a week, earned seven Emmy Awards and influenced period dramas such as Robert Altman’s Gosford Park

and the TV series Downton Abbey.

Pagett revelled in the show’s success – ‘‘There’s nothing more gratifying than busting into people’s homes,’’ she later joked – but left after two seasons, fearing she would be typecast by the role. The writers dispatched her character to New York.

She later appeared in the television movie Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), and starred in the BBC’s 10-episode adaptation of Anna Karenina (1977).

Two decades later, at a time when few celebrities or politicians spoke openly about mental health, she published a frank, lyrical memoir detailing her battle with manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder. As Pagett told it, she had ‘‘a crack-up, breakdown, burnout – call it what you will’’ in 1995. She became infatuated with a public figure (later identified as Alastair Campbell, spokesman for Labour leader Tony Blair), and began writing him rambling letters. One included a cheque for £6 billion, signed ‘‘Moi.’’

In the grip of psychosis, she accused her husband of incest and of feeding their daughter heroin. She went to a psychiatric hospital three times, she said, before beginning to manage her condition.

‘‘Sometimes when I think about where I went, my breath gets caught,’’ she wrote in

‘‘Now, when I look at people, and I can tell they’ve been there and back, I feel quite proud. I’ve got a tale too, I want to whisper.’’ Pagett on her bipolar condition

her memoir, Diamonds Behind My Eyes (1997). ‘‘But now, when I look at people, and I can tell they’ve been there and back, I feel quite proud. I’ve got a tale too, I want to whisper.’’

Nicola Mary Paget Scott was born in Cairo, where her father worked as a Shell oil executive. She added a T to Paget after leaving school. She won admission to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and, by 19, was performing in repertory theatre. She seemed on the verge of a professional breakthrough in 1965 but developed an eating disorder – another taboo subject for the times.

‘‘There was a general consensus that I was a bit chubby and had to lose weight,’’ she told the Daily Mail in 1995. ‘‘I was only a size 10, but it was the Sixties and Twiggy reigned supreme . . . I thought I would be worth more if I was thinner. You wake up feeling fat although you’re not.’’

Pagett made her London stage debut in 1968 and launched her film career with movies such as Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), and There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970), a romantic comedy with Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn. She later appeared in the 1985 miniseries ‘‘A Woman of Substance,’’ about the makings of a business empire, and starred as the sexually promiscuous Liz Rodenhurst in the 1989 series ABitofaDo.

In 1975 she married Graham Swannell, an actor turned playwright. They divorced in the late 1990s. She is survived by their daughter, and a sister.

Pagett once said she began to gain confidence as an actress after performing in Glasgow. At the time, her dream was to perform on the West End.

‘‘I wanted to go to London and act there – and I have, and I love it. But I don’t love it for the reasons I thought I would,’’ she told the Independent in 1992. ‘‘It doesn’t make me feel important, it doesn’t make me feel successful. I adore being in the paper and I love people knowing who I am, especially if they’re nice to me in the supermarket but, more than anything, I like looking into the eyes of someone whose work I respect and seeing them look back as if to say, ‘I think you can do it, too.’ If anything means anything, that does.’’ – Washington Post