Georgine Anderson

An always reliable character actor on both stage and screen, Georgine Anderson moved between regional repertory theatre, the West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre with consummate ease.

After graduating from RADA, she made her stage debut aged 19 with Colchester Rep in 1956 and took her leave of the boards in 2017, aged 89, at the National in Lost Without Words. The play featured her and four other actors in their 70s and 80s all improvising for the first time to prompts from directors Lee Simpson and Phelim McDermott. It was a remarkable act of courage, even from a performer as experienced as Anderson.

She caught early attention as Olga in Three Sisters at Nottingham Playhouse in 1958. It led to her joining Peter Hall’s company at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre the following year, staying as it transitioned into the RSC.

Though her roles were minor, in her year at Stratford-upon-Avon, she shared the stage with Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus, Charles Laughton’s King Lear and Paul Robeson’s Othello.

She was often to be found in the company of star names such as Tommy Steele or up-and-coming talents such as Tom Courtenay, appearing with both as Masha in Three Sisters at London’s Old Vic in 1960.

The early 1960s were spent at Birmingham Rep, where she was a notably monstrous Katherine to Derek Jacobi’s Henry VIII, a subtle Tamora in Titus Andronicus, and a beautifully poised Lady Fidget in The Country Wife (all in 1963).

At the Library in Manchester, she delivered a charming Portia in The Merchant of Venice (1063) and an imposing Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1964), and in 1967, toured to the US, Europe and Israel in a quartet of Shakespeare plays with Bristol Old Vic.

 Although television increasingly kept her away from the stage, she returned regularly to regional reps throughout the 1970s.

 The Stage hailed her Paulina in A Winter’s Tale at the Thorndike, Leatherhead in 1980 as “outstanding” and her Duchess of Berwick in Lady Windermere’s Fan at the Palace, Watford in 1985 was a waspishly amusing performance that Oscar Wilde himself might have admired.

She made her belated West End debut as Madame de Rosemonde in the RSC’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1988 and her Chichester Festival Theatre debut in Nicholas Wright’s Thérèse Raquin in 1990.

In London, roles at the Orange Tree Theatre and the Tricycle were followed by David Hare’s reworking of Ivanov at the Almeida in 1997 and a “compelling and dignified” Rebecca Nurse on tour with The Crucible in 1998.

Returning to Birmingham Rep in 1999, she made much of little as the dotty old Aunt in Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll, which was also seen at the National Theatre in 2000.

Later stage appearances included Uncle Vanya in Birmingham (2007) and Susan Glaspell’s Alison’s House at the Orange Tree Theatre (2009).

Her television breakthrough, having first appeared on screen in 1958, came in 1971 as Mrs Croft in Julian Mitchell’s adaptation of Persuasion and as Helen Hughes in John Finch’s domestic drama A Family at War.

There were notable performances in David Ruskin’s Penda’s Fen (1974), as Miss Gaunt alongside Geraldine McEwan in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1978), Countess Fosco in The Woman in White (1982) and in Blott on the Landscape (1985). Other small-screen credits included Coronation Street, Take the High Road, Casualty, Russell T Davies’ children’s drama Century Falls, Doctor Who and her 2014 swansong in New Tricks.

Jean Margaret ‘Georgine’ Anderson was born on February 8, 1928 and died on February 15, aged 96. She is survived by five nieces, three nephews and two grand-nieces.