Barbara Jefford

Distinguished Devon-born British actress, acclaimed for her commanding performances on the classical stage. Jefford did her initial training at the Hartly-Hodder School of Speech and Drama and graduated from RADA in 1949. Following her professional acting debut that same year, she spent a year on the repertory stage before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon where her roles included Calpurnia in "Julius Caesar", Desdemona in "Othello" (both opposite Anthony Quayle) and Kate in "The Taming of the Shrew" (opposite Keith Michell as Petruchio). In 1956, Jefford moved to the Old Vic and put her extensive repertoire to good use, headlining in a one-woman show entitled "Heroines of Shakespeare". In the course of her lengthy theatrical career, the charismatic actress relished every opportunity to tackle diverse and complex characters, from Cleopatra and Joan of Arc to Hedda Gabler and Gwendolen Fairfax. In 1965, she reputedly became the youngest recipient of an OBE for services to the theatre at the age of 35. As late as 2002, she appeared as Queen Margaret opposite Kenneth Branagh in Richard III at the Crucible in Sheffield, eliciting an appreciative review from The Guardian which described Jefford as "one of the greatest of Shakespearean actors" who played her part with "Grecian grandeur ". Despite some early TV work, Jefford's film career did not rise to the same lofty heights and only began when she was already in her mid-thirties (then playing Molly Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses (1967)). Her rather infrequent later big screen appearances tended to be in off-beat roles: a vampiric countess in Hammer's Lust for a Vampire (1971), Magda Goebbels in Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), the coldly self-righteous Mrs. Herriton in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991) and an eccentric, wheelchair-bound German baroness in Roman Polanski's thriller The Ninth Gate (1999). For the small screen, Jefford guested in episodes of The House of Eliott (1991), Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1987) and Midsomer Murders (1997). Between 1950 and 2003, she also lent her voice to many BBC radio adaptations of classic plays.