Jane Lapotaire, who has died aged 81, will always be identified with the title role in Pam Gems’s play Piaf. Opening at Stratford’s the Other Place in 1978, it moved to the West End and Broadway, winning Lapotaire an Olivier award and a Tony. With her Gallic ancestry – she was born to a French mother and raised by an English foster parent in Ipswich – Lapotaire seemed born to play Edith Piaf, but her performance transcended impersonation. What she showed us was a woman whose art was dependent on her ferocious loyalty to her working-class origins: one who self-deprecatingly dubbed herself “just a bit of slum rubbish”. Above all, with her wide-open smile, she captured Piaf’s ramshackle life, emotional generosity and invincible good nature.
It was a gift of a role and one that Lapotaire rightly relished. But its success obscured the fact that Lapotaire was that relatively rare creature: a genuinely classical actor most at home in Shakespeare, Sophocles, Ibsen or Chekhov. She did her fair share of television – indeed she came to prominence in a TV series about Marie Curie – but it was on the stage that she revealed her instinctive intelligence and vocal precision.
