Anne Stallybrass obit

Anne Stallybrass obituary

Actor known for her role as Anne, the spirited wife in the 1970s BBC TV drama The Onedin Line

 She was not on the list.

The actor Anne Stallybrass, who has died aged 82, will be best remembered for her roles in television period dramas of the 1970s. She reached her biggest audience – in 70 countries – as Anne, wife of the shipping line founder James Onedin, in the BBC series The Onedin Line. Peter Gilmore played James – described by one critic as “a working-class Horatio Hornblower” – who begins his rocky business voyage in late-19th century Liverpool by investing the £25 inheritance he has received from his father, a chandlery owner, in the Charlotte Rhodes, a square-rigged, three-masted, top-sailed schooner, and going into competition with his former employer.

He is sold the vessel by Captain Webster (played by the fruity-voiced James Hayter) for a bargain price on condition that he marries his spirited daughter, Anne, who never holds back in voicing her disapproval over her husband’s ruthless business methods – and is aware that she is just another transaction.

Stallybrass’s character teaches James’s shipmate, Baines, to read and write. Off screen, Howard Lang, who played Baines, called Stallybrass “daughter” – harking back to the relationship they enjoyed on screen in the acclaimed TV drama The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), when she took the role of Jane Seymour and he played her father, Sir John.

After two series (1971-72), Stallybrass left The Onedin Line, for fear of becoming typecast and longing to return to her first love, the theatre. She was written out, with Anne dying in childbirth and James naming a steamship after her.

Later, Stallybrass started a relationship with Gilmore, and they eventually married in 1987.

While the second run of The Onedin Line was being broadcast, she was also seen on television as Anna Strauss in the Austrian music-dynasty drama The Strauss Family (1972). She gained a 1973 Bafta best actress nomination for her portrayals of both Anne in The Onedin Line and the wife in The Strauss Family who leaves Johann Sr to his lover and devotes her life to helping their son, Johann Jr, further his career.

She was born in Rochford, Essex, to Edward Stallybrass, a Bank of England clerk, and Annie (nee Peacock). Her paternal great-grandfather, also called Edward, was a missionary who worked among the Buryat people of Siberia, was granted an audience with Alexander I of Russia on the way there and translated the Bible into Mongolian. The family was evacuated to Hampshire during the second world war, then moved to Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, where Anne attended St Bernard’s convent school before studying drama at the Royal Academy of Music (1957-60), graduating with its gold medal.

She gained her first professional acting experience with the Arthur Brough Players, both at the Leas Pavilion in Folkestone, Kent, where she made her debut in Rookery Nook in 1960, and the Palace theatre, Westcliff.

While at the Sheffield Playhouse, Stallybrass was first heard on radio when the Playhouse production of the Jack Malton play A Jug of Bread (1963), about a pools win, was broadcast in the BBC Home Service series Repertory in Britain. A year later, she made her television debut in an episode of Emergency – Ward 10. She followed it by playing Ellen, the compassionate housekeeper, in a four-part adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1967) and Sally Hardcastle, who reluctantly accepts the advances of a wealthy bookmaker to keep her family out of poverty, in John Finch’s adaptation of Walter Greenwood’s depression-era novel Love on the Dole (1967), as well as taking many one-off character parts.

 Her other TV roles included Dasha in a six-part serialisation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1969); Elizabeth Milton, third wife of the poet John, in the Omnibus biography Paradise Restored (1972); Gentle Schofield, a widow who marries Jack Shaw (Michael Elphick), in This Year Next Year; the mother taking her children from suburban London to live in the countryside in the Sunday-teatime Edwardian drama The Peppermint Pig (both 1977); Susan, the wife sold to a sailor by Michael Henchard (Alan Bates), in Dennis Potter’s adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978); Jean Bradley, vying with a Rolls-Royce for the affections of her husband (Frank Windsor), in Flying Lady (1989); and Muriel Thomas in The Old Devils (1992).

In a rare excursion into screen sitcom, Stallybrass starred in Misfits (1981) as Liz Ridgeway, a divorcee whose life is turned upside down when she takes in two male lodgers.

Following a 1993 appearance as Eileen Reynolds, aunt of the GP Kate Rowan (Niamh Cusack), in the drama Heartbeat, she returned for a five-year run (1993-98), when her character enjoyed a brief romance with Oscar Blaketon (Derek Fowlds). Stallybrass also played the Queen, with Serena Scott Thomas as the princess, in Diana: Her True Story (1993), based on Andrew Morton’s book.

Stallybrass’s final screen role came in A Song for Jenny, Frank McGuinness’s 2015 television film adaptation of Julie Nicholson’s book about losing a daughter in the 7/7 London bombings. Emily Watson played Julie, with Stallybrass as her mother.

Of her biggest screen roles, she recalled: “I became well known for playing long-suffering ‘historical’ ladies – Jane Seymour, the Mayor of Casterbridge’s wife, Mrs James Onedin. I’ve been ill-used by my screen husbands – rotters to a man.”

Stallybrass never achieved her ambition of acting with the Royal Shakespeare or National companies but said she loved theatre because it brought “a marvellous sense of belonging and working together as a team”. One of her best roles was Charlotte Brontë in the premiere of Noel Robinson’s play Glasstown on a national tour, followed by a run at London’s Westminster theatre, in 1973.

At the Young Vic in the same year, she gave a performance of subtlety as the domineering Maggie in Harold Brighouse’s classic Hobson’s Choice. She also enjoyed touring alongside comedians such as Eric Sykes in Alan Ayckbourn’s Time and Time Again (1983-84).

Stallybrass and Gilmore, her second husband, had a home they named Onedin House in Dartmouth, Devon, where the television series was filmed.

Gilmore died in 2013. Stallybrass’s first marriage, in 1963, to the actor Roger Rowland, ended in divorce. She is survived by two nieces, Caroline and Nicola, and a nephew, Jeremy.

Jacqueline Anne Stallybrass, actor, born 4 December 1938; died 3 July 2021.

 

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