In 2010, Kevin Younger began an article in the Guardian with the words: “Recognise the faces but can’t place the names?” Among the list of Britain’s top 10 great unsung television character actors that followed was Georgina Hale. “This slinky, adenoidal, estuarine glamour-puss oozed naughtiness in some interesting films and some classic television in the 70s,” he wrote. “She has latterly cornered the market in nouveau riche languor and middle-aged decadence.”
Although most of her screen roles were on television, Hale, who has died aged 80, was a favourite of the flamboyant film director Ken Russell, who once said she was “an actress of such sensitivity that she can make the hair rise on your arms”.
She was at her best for Russell in his fictionalised musical biopic Mahler (1974), portraying the wife of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, played by Robert Powell. “It is Georgina Hale’s playing of Alma which gives the film most of its vitality,” observed the Daily Mirror critic Arthur Thirkell.
Alma, Mahler’s musically ambitious wife, joins him on a train journey through Austria, which is punctuated by flashbacks to key events in his life. This stifling of her creativity is symbolised in the opening scene, as Gustav dreams of his wife rolling around on rocks, naked and trying to set herself free from the translucent cocoon that surrounds her. Later, he dreams of his death and burial, with Alma leading the funeral procession, then stripping for a Nazi lover.
Hale’s performance was rewarded with a Bafta film award as most promising newcomer. She had previously appeared in Russell’s two 1971 pictures: The Devils, as the pregnant, abandoned conquest of a philandering Roman Catholic priest accused of witchcraft (played by Oliver Reed); and The Boy Friend, as Fay, one of the fictional company singing and dancing alongside Twiggy in the director’s screen version of Sandy Wilson’s stage musical pastiche.
She made uncredited cameo appearances in two more Russell films, Lisztomania (1975) and Valentino (1977), and played the young Jim Hawkins’s flirtatious bingo-calling mother in Russell’s bizarre take on Treasure Island, a 1995 TV movie that replaced Long John Silver with Long Jane Silver.
In between, Hale was kept busy on television with roles such as the murderer Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, in ITV’s series Ladykillers (1980) and Moya Lexington, an amalgam of the pioneering aviator Amy Johnson and the actor Sarah Churchill, in Terence Rattigan’s play After the Dance (1992) for the BBC. “She’s on the drink, on the drugs and she flies her own aeroplane,” said Hale.
She also found a new audience as the witch Tabatha Bag in the later runs of the ITV children’s series T-Bag, beginning with T-Bag and the Pearls of Wisdom (1990) and ending with Take Off With T-Bag (1992). She took over from Elizabeth Estensen, who had played Tabatha’s sister, Tallulah Bag, since the programme’s first episode in 1985.
But Hale then saw screen roles begin to dry up. “Once I reached 51, my life changed,” she said in 2002. “Four years ago, I tried to change my agent, and 11 turned me down. One told me they didn’t take actresses over 45 because it was too depressing to talk to them on the telephone.” There was even a two-year spell spent washing dishes in a restaurant, but stage work kept her career going.
She was born in Ilford, Essex, to Elsie (nee Fordham) and George Hole, who ran a pub. She said she grew up overweight and shy, and kept changing school as her parents moved around different pubs – something she believed damaged her education. “I couldn’t write, spell or read,” she told the Glasgow Herald in 2002. “There was a real shame in it, and you were the dunce of the class, always getting whacked around the head.”
Her mother died when she was 18, followed by her father four years later. At the age of 19, having never visited a theatre, she was given tickets to see West Side Story, which, she said, “blew my mind”.
She was working in London, as a junior with a Knightsbridge hairdresser, when she spotted an actors’ workshop in Chelsea teaching the Stanislavski technique of method acting. This led her to train at Rada, graduating in 1965. Tweaking her professional name to Hale, she began her career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in walk-on roles at both Stratford-upon-Avon and the Aldwych theatre, London (1965-66).
Her West End debut came in The Seagull, by Chekhov, at the Duke of York’s theatre in 1976 as, according to the Stage’s critic, “a tender, thoughtful, charming” Nina. She then starred as Bobbi Michele, alongside Lee Montague, in the British premiere of Neil Simon’s play Last of the Red Hot Lovers at the Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester (1979), which transferred to the Criterion theatre in London (1979-80).
Hale was back in the West End – earning an Olivier award nomination – as Josie in Nell Dunn’s play Steaming (Comedy theatre, 1981-82), set in a Turkish bath. Even though she appeared naked for Russell on film – and was seen wearing nothing but an apron as she cooked breakfast for Roger Daltrey in the 1980 crime movie McVicar – she told the Liverpool Daily Post: “I don’t mind having to take my clothes off. It’s a slice of life, after all. But I don’t really enjoy it.”
Her later stage roles included Gwen in Simon Gray’s black comedy Life Support at the Aldwych theatre in 1997 and Greta Scacchi’s adoptive mother in The Guardsman, by Ferenc Molnar at the Albery, now Noel Coward, theatre, in 2000.
On television, she first made an impression as Adam Faith’s wife, Jean Bird, in Budgie (1971-72), and appeared in drama, comedy and soaps. In the 1972 film Eagle in a Cage, about Napoleon’s imprisonment on St Helena, she played the fallen emperor’s friend Betsy Balcombe.
Hale’s 1964 marriage to the actor John Forgeham ended in divorce.
• Georgina Hale, actor, born 4 August 1943; died 4 January 2024
• This article was amended on 10 January 2024 to change a picture that did not show Georgina Hale.
