The American-born actor Beth Porter, who has died aged 81, had a varied career that took off in her homeland with experimental theatre before she moved to Britain and reached a wider audience in two groundbreaking television series.
In Rock Follies of 77, a sequel to 1976’s Rock Follies, she had a strong supporting role as Kitty Schreiber, the tough, wheeler-dealing American managing the gutsy Little Ladies singing trio played by Julie Covington, Charlotte Cornwell and Rula Lenska.
Howard Schuman’s creation, featuring his lyrics and Andy Mackay’s melodies, had already followed the band on the unglamorous pub and club circuit, and he wrote this new role specially for Porter, having previously worked with her. Also new for the sequel was Sue Jones-Davies, who joined the lineup, with Cornwell eventually sidelined after her character is burned out by drink and drugs.
Throughout it all, Porter portrayed the brash, dynamic Kitty, navigating a ruthless industry – and recording contract – with attitude and outlandish dress sense, and the memorable catchphrase “Cray-zee ’bout it!” She also had the chance to sing a couple of numbers herself, although lamented that neither appeared on the soundtrack album, thereby denying her royalties.
Porter then played the Marketing Girl in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on BBC radio in 1978. Although she appeared in only the final episode, Douglas Adams’s sci-fi satire became an institution as it evolved into books and a 1981 television serial, in which she recreated her part.
Inevitably cast as Americans in Britain, she also had a leading role as a Southern belle and bestselling novelist in The Deep Concern, a 1979 whodunnit written by Elwyn Jones. Later, in 1988, she was in sitcom as Hannah, a pregnant hippy, in the first series of Square Deal, alongside the yuppies played by Timothy Bentinck and Lise Ann McLaughlin.
Beth was born in New York, to Marya (nee Neer), originally from Ukraine, and Ralph Porter, an actor, writer and director. She performed at Horace Greeley high school, trained with the director John Houseman at the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario, and was a member of the Chappaqua drama group before graduating in drama from Bard College, New York.
In 1966, Porter joined the company at La MaMa, an experimental theatre club in New York where the artistic director was Tom O’Horgan. He later directed the world premieres of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar.
At the same time, she was a regular at Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village, a coffeehouse-cum-theatre. There she met Andy Milligan, a director who cast her in the title role of The Naked Witch, a horror story among a string of low-budget sexploitation films he made in 1967. She played an awakened 19th-century sorceress seeking to avenge her own murder.
Then, on a 1967 European tour with the LaMaMa troupe, she met Peter Reid at the Edinburgh festival. They married in 1969, a year after forming – with Tony Sibbald – Wherehouse La Mama as a European offshoot of the original group, touring until 1971. She also led workshops with the London cast of Hair during 1968.
For a while, film directors continued to exploit Porter’s sexy image – casting her in Futz (1969), a US screen version of a La MaMa stage production, as the promiscuous Marjorie Satz and, after she settled in Britain, in Eskimo Nell (1975) as Billie Harris, one of those auditioning for the starring role in a sex movie – based on the pornographic poem – being made by a sleazy producer (played by Roy Kinnear).
But her acting talents started to be recognised. She almost stole the show as the outgoing girlfriend of an American underground film-maker in London – displaying her tap-dancing skills – in Schuman’s play Vérité (1973) for the ITV Armchair Theatre strand before taking the title role of a paranoid children’s author in Anxious Annie (1977), his contribution to the LWT anthology series She.
There were also film appearances in The Great Gatsby (1974) as Mrs McKee, Love and Death (1975), as the sister-in-law of Woody Allen’s pacifist Russian soldier, and Yentl (1983), in which she played, uncredited, the maid of Amy Irving’s character and was a stand-in doubling for the star, Barbra Streisand, in camera set-ups.
Porter worked mostly behind the scenes in the 1980s, when the BBC trained her as a script editor and development executive. She script-edited Fighting Back (1986), a drama series starring Hazel O’Connor as a single mother, and produced two short TV plays, The Husband, the Wife and the Stranger (1986), a mystery with Adam Faith, and Unusual Ground Floor Conversion (1989), with Adrian Dunbar as an author moving home.
She was also London editor of Film Journal International, the author of novels and collections of short fiction, and a web producer for corporate websites.
Porter in later years lived reclusively in an East Sussex village. In her 2016 memoir, Walking on My Hands, she revealed a “two-night stand” with Frank Sinatra in 1965.
Following her marriage to Reid, which ended in divorce in 1979, Porter had relationships with the directors Jack Clayton and Kerry Lee Crabbe.
• Beth Jane Porter, actor, writer and producer, born 23 May 1942; died 1 August 2023
