Rosemary Leach
Actress who played Aunt Fenny in The Jewel in the Crown and starred in the sitcom My Family
ROSEMARY LEACH, who has died aged 81, appeared in dozens of television roles in a career spanning half a century, but was best known for her portrayal of mettlesome women in powerful dramas such as The Jewel in the Crown (ITV, 1984) and the long-running sitcom My Family (BBC, 2000-11).
Although her career flagged in the late 1970s, she made a successful stage comeback playing the American scriptwriter Helene Hanff who corresponded for 20 years with an antiquarian bookseller in 84 Charing Cross Road. The role earned her a Society of West End Theatre award in 1982.
Her first standout television part was in The Power Game (ITV, 1965-69) as Susan Weldon, mistress of the ruthless business executive John Wilder (played by Patrick Wymark) in a series seen as a British forerunner to Dallas.
She followed this in 1971 with a starring role as the mother in a television adaptation of Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee’s memoir of growing up in Gloucestershire.
Three years later she took the part of David Essex’s mother in That’ll Be the Day, returning to television in 1975 opposite Bernard Hepton in the ITV comedy Sadie, It’s Cold Outside. Although written by the acclaimed Jack Rosenthal, the series was not judged a critical success. Nor was Life Begins At Forty (ITV, 1978), in which she co-starred with Derek Nimmo, although this proved a ratings hit with viewers and was later sold to East Germany where it was used in an adult education campaign to encourage people to have more children.
In 1987 she was reunited with Bernard Hepton in ITV’S The Charmer, starring Nigel Havers in the title role, but in which she shone as Hepton’s snobbish girlfriend Joan Plumleigh-bruce.
Rosemary Leach appeared in comparatively few feature films, but in the Oscar-winning Merchant Ivory adaptation of EM Forster’s Room with a View (1985), she was cast as Mrs Honeychurch, the aristocratic mother of the radiant Lucy (Helena Bonhamcarter in her first film role) and the ne’er-do-well Freddy (Rupert Graves). This, and her part in That’ll Be the Day (1974), both earned her Bafta nominations.
The daughter of teachers, Rosemary Anne Leach was born on December 18 1935 at Delbury, a village near Much Wenlock in Shropshire.
After grammar school she trained at Rada, having auditioned on impulse after her sister read a magazine article about acting, but counted her time there as the unhappiest of her life on account of being humiliated in front of other students as a way of testing her aptitude for stage work.
She joined repertory companies in Amersham, Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool and acted with the Bristol Old Vic, as well as performing on the back of a lorry in a children’s mobile theatre and in a season at Butlins’ holiday camp in Pwllheli, North Wales. When her big break came in 1965, cast as the mistress of building tycoon Sir John Wilder in the television boardroom drama The Power Game, she eventually wearied of the recognition it brought, finding she was unable to walk down the street without people identifying her as “Wilder’s knocking piece”.
Television continued to seek her out, and Rosemary Leach was often cast in high-profile productions, among them as Dulcinella in the lavish BBC adaptation of The Adventures of Don Quixote (1973), starring Rex Harrison and Frank Finlay. In 1981 she played Emilia opposite Bob Hoskins’s Iago in the BBC’S Shakespeare season production of Othello. The following year she appeared as the matchmaking Aunt Fenny in ITV’S The Jewel in the Crown, set in the final days of the Raj in India during the Second World War, one of the landmark series, like Brideshead Revisited, of 1980s British television.
In 1992, Rosemary Leach starred in An Ungentlemanly Act, a BBC television film about the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, playing the real-life Lady Mavis Hunt, wife of the islands’ then-governor, Sir Rex Hunt. She played the Queen several times, including in a television film Prince William (2002), and a play Tea With Betty (2006), and between 2003 and 2007 appeared as Susan Harper’s martini-swilling mother Grace Riggs in My Family.
Rosemary Leach’s first marriage, to the theatre director John Waugh, ended in divorce. On her 46th birthday, in 1981, she married the actor Colin Starkey, who survives her.
Rosemary Leach, born December 18 1935, died October 21 2017