Patti Love
Actor whose intense performances secured her work in leading companies and theatres across the UK
Although she had a successful and wide-ranging career on stage and screen, for theatregoers of a certain age Patti Love will be indelibly associated with David Edgar’s Mary Barnes, a searing portrait of a woman’s descent into schizophrenia and her eventual recovery.
It was Love who had suggested Barnes’ autobiography to Edgar, having first worked with him in his 1972 fringe play Baby Love, playing a 19-year-old imprisoned for stealing a baby. The play was broadcast in the BBC’s Play for Today slot two years later.
Mary Barnes opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1978 before transferring to the Royal Court in London, with Love completely immersed in the most emotionally punishing of roles and Simon Callow as her psychiatrist (loosely based on RD Laing who had treated Barnes). Paying tribute, Edgar described Love’s portrayal as “one of the greatest performances I have ever seen”.
Born in Glasgow, after graduating from the Drama Centre in London she joined the Glasgow Citizens where, as the mute daughter Katarina in Mother Courage, she caught the attention of The Stage, declaring her “a young actress to watch”.
Other notable roles for the company included Shaw’s Joan of Arc, Olivia in Twelfth Night and Chantal in Genet’s The Balcony.
In 1972 she moved to the Traverse in Edinburgh, appearing alongside Alan Howard in CP Taylor’s The Black and White Minstrels, and opposite Ian Holm in Stanley Eveling’s Caravaggio Buddy.
The following year, Love found herself in London teaming up with the likes of Cheryl Campbell, Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent as part of Keith Hack’s Showman Productions season of plays at the Place. She later reunited with Hack for Claire Booth Luce’s The Women at the Old Vic in 1985.
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Having made her National Theatre debut in 1974 in Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, she returned in 1976 for Carlo Goldoni’s Il Campiello – the first production in the Olivier Theatre on the Southbank – and again in 1981 for Arnold Wesker’s Caritas (another spellbinding performance of a character caught between agony and ecstasy) and opposite Michael Bryant’s Uncle Vanya in 1982.
With the Royal Shakespeare Company, she was Simba to Ian McKellen’s The Marquis of Keith (1974), Pearl in The Iceman Cometh (1976), and Lady Mortimer and Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, which toured in 1980.
An aloof, haughty and spiteful Regan in King Lear at the Northcott, Exeter in 1981, back at London’s Royal Court she was notable in Serious Monday (transferring with it to Wyndham’s Theatre in 1987) and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991).
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Later stage performances included Peter Hall’s Lysistrata (Old Vic, London, 1993), a vain and malevolent Lady Fanciful in The Provoked Wife (touring through 1994), a commanding presence in The Life and Times of Fanny Hill (Dukes Lancaster, 1997) and an imposing, combustible Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme in 2000.
A regular television face in popular dramas from Within These Walls (19976) and Shoestring (1980) to Casualty (1991), Cracker (1993), Middlemarch (1994) and Grange Hill (1998), her film appearances included That’ll Be the Day (1973), The Long Good Friday (1980) and Mrs Henderson Presents (2005).
From 2020, she lived in the actors’ retirement home Denville Hall and in later years was diagnosed with dementia.
Patti Love was born on August 18, 1947, and died on February 17, aged 75.
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