There is a huge raft of exceptional British stage actors who merit commemoration even though they never hit the “big time” in a film franchise or a television soap. Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who has died aged 88, was one of the best of them.
On stage, it was a classic progression from the Bristol Old Vic – “Oh, how I wish I could convey the excitement those words engendered in me as a young girl,” she said – to the West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National – over several decades.
Distantly related to the great 19th-century critic and essayist Leigh Hunt, imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent as corpulent, she had a similar gift for getting straight to the point. There was an uncompromising aspect to her acting. She was a thorough professional, with an armour-plated technique that could encompass high comedy, as with Coward, Wilde and Shaw, not-so-high comedy – Mrs Mouse, Are You Within?, a 1968 West End hit that became a TV film (1971) directed by Mike Newell – and full-blown tragedy, notably Goneril to Donald Sinden’s King Lear at the RSC (1976, with Michael Williams as the Fool).
She also seemed to have a magic key to much of the contemporary drama of her day, appearing with distinction in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1974), Howard Barker’s That Good Between Us (1977), Hugh Whitemore’s Pack of Lies (1983) – opposite Judi Dench and Williams in a play about spycatching in the suburbs – and the David Hare milestone trilogy of plays – Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War – about the clergy, the law and the Labour party at the National in 1993.
This followed her Olivier award-winning performance as Sybil Birling in Stephen Daldry’s magical National Theatre revival in 1992 of a play from earlier in the century, JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. With different casts, this celebrated production has toured and returned to the West End for many years.
Leigh-Hunt’s articulation was perfect, cut-glass, unarguable, her profile aquiline but mobile when adjusted by her mouth movement, which was highly expressive. So, she could as easily become a society grande dame (in Wilde), a more provincial lady (in Pride and Prejudice on TV) or an academic vice-principal (in Daldry’s 2000 film of Billy Elliot).
But her biggest film success came in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), the maestro’s penultimate movie, returning to his London roots, in which she was raped and strangled by a necktie murderer (Barry Foster). François Truffaut, in his definitive study of Hitchcock, said that in this film the director abandoned his practice of using glamour stars (eg Grace Kelly) in favour of “girl-next-door-types” – who were Leigh-Hunt, Anna Massey, Vivien Merchant and Billie Whitelaw. I think Truffaut meant lesser known but better actors than Kelly.
Leigh-Hunt was fond of Hitchcock, describing him as a “perfect gentleman” who, after each day’s filming, dropped her off at her Baker Street lodging before progressing to Claridge’s.
Born in Bath, Somerset, Barbara was the daughter of Betty (Elizabeth) and Austin Leigh-Hunt. Her mother soon afterwards left her father and brought up Barbara with no financial help, working for Boots and taking her daughter to the theatre in Bath or Bristol on a regular basis.
Barbara was educated locally before moving to London with her mother and finding her way first to Kensington high school for girls and then back to the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, where she graduated in 1953 with the accolade of “most promising student”.
She had made a BBC radio debut in 1947 on Children’s Hour and appeared regularly thereafter on Radios 3 and 4. Her theatrical debut came with the Old Vic in London in 1954, travelling with the company on tour to the US and Canada in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. After seasons with the Old Vic, and in Nottingham and Guildford, she returned to Bristol under Val May’s direction and got seriously stuck into the classical repertoire: Hedda Gabler, She Stoops to Conquer, Blithe Spirit, Lady Macbeth, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado … no female actor today has a chance to do all that at such a young age, or with such great encouragement.
A Bristol Old Vic production went to the West End: Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head (1963), about love and promiscuity in the so-called civilised middle-classes, had been adapted from her novel by Priestley. The cast was led by Robert Hardy and Paul Eddington.
Leigh-Hunt’s stock was now high, her reputation unassailable. With the RSC in the 1970s, apart from Travesties and King Lear, she played Madge Larrabee in the 1974 rediscovery of William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes, with John Wood and Tim Pigott-Smith, Paulina in A Winter’s Tale, and Helen in Troilus and Cressida
In 1967 she married the actor Richard Pasco and became stepmother to his son, William, from his first marriage. While the two actors did appear together, it was never as a double act in the manner of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. They were in demand together for poetry recitals, and were both in 1981 RSC productions of Ostrovsky’s The Forest and Schnitzler’s La Ronde, Leigh-Hunt as an actor inflaming a somewhat over-schematic production by John Barton with her fluttering fake orgasm – as she put it: “Well, at least that’s better than acting in stupid plays!”
At the National she was in a white-hot 1988 revival by Howard Davies of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, playing opposite Eric Porter’s Big Daddy as a devastatingly intoned Big Mama, a woman you could all too easily learn not to love after 40 years in her company.
There followed such fine NT performances as Dame Purecraft, a closet hedonist with money, in Richard Eyre’s glorious 1989 revival of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair; as a magisterially deaf materfamilias in Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance in the same year; and a heartrending, lonely vicar’s wife in Hare’s Racing Demon, the first of his trilogy, with Eyre directing, Leigh-Hunt an unloved husk pottering among her potted plants.
After making a television debut in 1956, she popped up in various series, in Eyre’s controversial Falklands war film Tumbledown (1988) as Jean Lawrence, and as Lady Catherine de Bourgh (perfect) in Pride and Prejudice (1995). Notable feature film appearances after Frenzy included the Queen Mother of Bavaria in Tony Palmer’s Wagner (1983), also a TV series – Richard Burton was the composer, and Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud were ministers of Ludwig II – and Lady Bareacres in Mira Nair’s superb version of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (2004), with Reese Witherspoon and a galaxy of British acting talent.
Richard died in 2014. She is survived by two cousins.
• Barbara Leigh-Hunt, actor, born 14 December 1935; died 16 September 2024
• This article was amended on 26 September 2024. The murderer in the film Frenzy was played by Barry Foster rather than Jon Finch.
