The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Sarah Lawson Sarah Lawson, born August 8 1928, died August 18 2023
Actress who played a Home Counties hostess in the Hammer Horror cult classic The Devil Rides Out
SARAH LAWSON, who has died aged 95, was the actress best known for the cult classic The Devil Rides Out (1968), considered one of the greatest of all Hammer Horrors, second only to Dracula (1958).
Auburn-haired and high-cheekboned, described as a “copper-and-cream” beauty, Sarah Lawson was cast as Marie, hostess of the claustrophobic mock-Tudor Home Counties mansion in which the cast are attacked by a Satanic cult. Marie’s poised wholesomeness, established as she serves sandwiches on the lawn and tucks up her daughter Peggy, is the perfect foil to the evil of Mocata (played by a velvety-voiced Charles Gray), the mesmeric, Aleister Crowley-esque cult leader with whom
Marie has a battle of wills.
Later, she watches as a tarantula the size of a Shetland pony menaces her daughter; in the (somewhat underwhelming) finale, Marie unexpectedly takes centre stage to defeat Mocata, with little help from her ineffectual husband, played with impeccable comic timing by Paul Eddington.
At the time, Hammer was synonymous with 19th-century Gothic, after their hit Dracula and Frankenstein franchises. The
Devil Rides Out was thus a daring departure, being a supernatural thriller about
Satanists, adapted from a 1934 Dennis Wheatley novel.
The studio was persuaded to option it in 1964 by Christopher Lee, who was earmarked to play the villain, but petitioned to be allowed to play the hero for once. The project was kept on ice for four years until censorship rules were relaxed, but the result, directed by Terence Fisher and featuring one of Lee’s finest performances, as the Duc de Richleau, was a masterpiece of its kind – and one of the rare Hammer films to please the critics of the day.
The Devil Rides Out also features Sarah Lawson’s husband, Patrick Allen, albeit invisibly. Allen, star of the television hit
Crane and an early contender to play James Bond, was brought in to dub over the actor Leon Green. (“He sang his lines and they just felt it could be improved upon,” explained Allen later.) The husband and wife had already shared a screen in another Christopher Lee-Terence Fisher collaboration, The Night of the Big Heat,
Lee’s science-fiction debut, in which Allen and Lawson play a couple who run a pub on an island invaded by aliens that looked – as Lee put it – “like fried eggs”.
Sarah Lawson was born in Wandsworth, south London, on August 8 1928, the youngest of three children of Edith (née Monteith) and Noel Lawson, a naval officer, son of the Victorian artist Francis Wilfred Lawson. She was brought up in Horsham, West Sussex, and attended Heron’s Ghyll Roman Catholic School, then the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.
Aged 19, she went to the 1947 Edinburgh Festival, and was asked by Perth Rep to play Lady Teazle in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal – “the sort of part you don’t usually get the chance of doing until you’re 40”.
Her big break was opposite Fay Compton in a Cocteau play called Intimate Relations in the West End in 1951, which led to her being cast in Street Corner (1953), a realist film about three policewomen. The Rank Organisation then signed her as a starlet, casting her as a Wren opposite Donald Sinden in the Technicolor satirical Cold War farce You Know What Sailors Are (1954).
By 1965 she had made, by her estimate, more than 300 television appearances, in everything from The Avengers to The Saint, and settled down as a crime specialist, appearing in Department S (1969), The Persuaders! (1971), Callan (1967), Father Brown (1974) and Bergerac (1981).
From 1978, she starred as the prison governor in Within These Walls, succeeding Googie Withers and Katharine Blake, a part for which she prepared by visiting HMP Holloway. “If you are living in the unbalanced world of a prison,” she concluded, “humour is particularly important. I inject bits of fun… I try to keep the conferences chirpy.” She was such a success that people on the street used to stop her to ask for legal advice.
In 1960, Sarah Lawson married Patrick Allen, whom she had met in 1955 when she went backstage at his play The Ark. As well as appearing in films such as Dial M for
Murder and The Wild Geese, he became known as “The King of the Voiceover”, a sideline culminating in 2005 as the voice of the television channel E4. He died in 2006; she is survived by their two sons.