When she was offered the role of the matriarchal Irene Raymond in EastEnders, Roberta Taylor told the producers that she did not mind what the character was like as long as she did not have to wear a cardigan.
Having barged her way through three years (1997-2000) of melodramatic plot lines – Irene was an ex-wife and estranged mother with a toyboy lover, a grocery store and a penchant for new age fads (including feng shui and aromatherapy) – she promptly jumped the good ship BBC for another hard-hitting role in ITV’s The Bill (2002-08), as the hard-drinking, no-nonsense Inspector Gina Gold.
Taylor, who has died aged 76, buttressed these powerfully occupied roles with a distinguished theatrical career, honing her craft and her unique blend of glamour and vulgarity over a long period of association – 1976 to 1995 – with the Citizens theatre, Glasgow, and with seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Exchange in Manchester, the Birmingham Rep and in the West End.
Her last major TV series was the cosy private investigators comedy Shakespeare & Hathaway (2018-22), with Jo Joyner as Luella Shakespeare and Mark Benton as a Colombo-style shambolic Frank Hathaway, and Taylor as the extravagantly attired and husky-voiced theatrical costumier, Gloria Fonteyn.
The series was shot mostly in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Taylor managed to wring genuine pathos in her solemn dedication of a dead dog’s ashes to the River Avon just beneath the stalls bar terrace of the Royal Shakespeare theatre.
Taylor’s final stage show was Jonathan Harvey’s jukebox musical Dusty (2018), which closed after a short tour despite a promising dramatic premise and strong performances by Katherine Kingsley as Dusty Springfield and Taylor as her undermining mother (“sly and subtle” said Susannah Clapp in the Observer).
By now, verging on the status of a household name, viewers and theatregoers were familiar with Taylor’s brand of cutting-edge, emotional truth, warm and expressive voice and those large and liquid brown eyes, set in a handsome, square-jawed face. She demonstrated triumphantly how a really good actor can encompass grand tragedy, high comedy and superior soap opera without strain.
And she had the bonus of being an authentic Cockney whose work on stage, as much as in her high-profile television career, was rooted in the family life and characters she described so vividly in her well-written memoir, Too Many Mothers (2005).
Roberta, generally known as “Robbie”, was born in Plaistow, east London, to Winifred Roberts, a clippy on the old trolley buses, and another bus conductor, Robert Archer, who was married elsewhere and did not stick around. She grew up in a small house on the Isle of Dogs with her mother, an overruling granny and several aunties.
But these women in her life, she always maintained, made her the woman she was. She attended the nearby church primary school, St Luke’s, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert secondary school, leaving without qualifications to take a series of secretarial jobs. While training to be a dental nurse, she took drama classes at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel.
By now she was married (in 1966) to Victor Taylor, a ropemaker, with whom she had a son, Elliott, born in the same year. An elderly friend in the Portobello market advised her that she should try out at a drama school. She did so, successfully, at the Central school, in 1973, on the same day that Peter Guinness, another would-be actor, and her future life partner and second husband, auditioned.
Taylor had set her heart on working at the Citizens, then establishing itself, under the directorial triumvirate of Giles Havergal, designer Philip Prowse and translator/dramaturg Robert David MacDonald, as the most exciting and internationally minded theatre company in Britain.
She joined on graduating in 1976, first appearing that year in a repertoire of The Seven Deadly Sins by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (their last collaboration) and a glorious version of Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade, the first ever in English.
Other memorable performances included La Duchesse de Guermantes in A Waste of Time (1981), an extraordinary four-hour compression of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; and majestic high comedy performances in Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1984), in which Taylor was outrageously funny as Amanda, with a refined sense of vulgarity, rather as I imagine Gertrude Lawrence to have been in the original production, and in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1986). There a hilarious Taylor, as the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley who finds an incriminating bracelet caught on her wrist, uttered a four-letter expletive and, on attempting to stuff a letter down her dress, revealed her naked breasts.
In 1990, she played in the Citizens revival of Brecht’s Mother Courage with Glenda Jackson, also seen at the newly renovated (now defunct) Mermaid theatre in Puddle Dock, London. As Yvette, Taylor complemented Jackson’s tremendous lead performance, whoring among the military in red platform-sole, lace-up boots.
Much later, in 2014, she returned to the Citizens in Dominic Hill’s revival of Hamlet, playing Gertrude to Guinness’s Claudius. One night, when an angry Claudius exited stage left with a command to follow him, she unexpectedly turned on her heel and exited stage right, winning a huge laugh and redefining the wedge of disaffection driving down into their onstage relationship.
Her films were few and far between, but they included notable vignettes in Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1990), starring Anjelica Huston and Mai Zetterling; and Brian Gilbert’s Tom and Viv (1994).
A dedicated smoker, Taylor suffered from emphysema, and a fall two months ago agitated her underlying ill health with pneumonia, an infection she could not overcome. She divorced her first husband in 1975 and set up home in Pimlico, central London, and then Vauxhall, with Guinness, 20 years ago. They married in 1996.
He survives her, as does Elliott, a granddaughter, Ellis, and two stepbrothers, Bill and Lionel.
• Roberta Alexandra Mary Taylor, actor, born 26 February 1948; died 6 July 2024
• This article was amended on 24 July 2024 to correct a detail about Roberta Taylor’s family
