Anna Massey

Anna Raymond Massey (11 August 1937 – 3 July 2011) was an English actress born in Thakeham, Sussex, the daughter of British actress Adrianne Allen and Canadian-born Hollywood actor Raymond Massey. Her parents separated when she was an infant, and she remained in England with her mother. Her older brother, Daniel Massey, also pursued an acting career. Through her father's side of the family, she was the niece of Vincent Massey, a Governor General of Canada, and her godfather was film director John Ford. She received no formal training at drama school or in repertory, yet built a career spanning more than one hundred character roles across British film and television.

Massey made her stage debut in May 1955 at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, playing Jane in The Reluctant Debutante at the age of seventeen. She repeated the role at the Cambridge Theatre in London the same month before leaving the London cast to bring the production to New York, where she appeared on Broadway in October 1956 under the title The Debutante. That Broadway appearance earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 1957.

Her early film work was concentrated in mystery and thriller productions. She made her cinema debut in Gideon's Day (1958), directed by her godfather John Ford, playing the daughter of Jack Hawkins's Detective Inspector character. She went on to appear in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) as a potential murder victim, Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), and Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), in which she played a barmaid named Babs. Massey later noted that she had originally auditioned for the smaller role of a secretary in Frenzy and that her character's nude scenes were performed by body doubles. In 1973 she appeared alongside her brother Daniel in The Vault of Horror, the two playing siblings within the horror anthology.

On the stage, Massey won the Laurence Olivier Award for Actress of the Year in a Supporting Role in 1982 for The Importance of Being Earnest and received an additional Olivier nomination that same year for Actress of the Year in a New Play for Summer. In the 1990s she participated in a dramatised reading of correspondence between T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf alongside Alan Bennett, in a production devised by Patrick Garland at the Charleston Festival.

Television occupied a significant portion of her career. Her first small-screen appearance came in October 1955, when she played Jacqueline in Green of the Year. Subsequent television credits included The Pallisers (1974), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), a 1979 adaptation of Rebecca in which she starred opposite her former husband Jeremy Brett, The Cherry Orchard (1980), Anna Karenina (1985), The Darling Buds of May (1991), and The Robinsons (2005). She also appeared in episodes of Inspector Morse, The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, Midsomer Murders, Lewis, and Agatha Christie's Poirot, as well as in the 2008 BBC adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, in which she played Mrs D'Urberville. In 1987 she received the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her performance as Edith Hope in the 1986 television adaptation of Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, having acquired the television rights to the novel a few weeks before it won the Booker Prize.

Her radio work was equally substantial. She served as the principal narrator of This Sceptred Isle on BBC Radio 4, a history of Britain from Roman times that ran for more than three hundred fifteen-minute episodes. With Imelda Staunton, she co-devised and starred as Josephine Daunt in Daunt and Dervish for BBC radio, and in 2009 she appeared in a new radio version of The Killing of Sister George. She also recorded several audiobooks, among them Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

In her personal life, Massey was married to actor Jeremy Brett from 1958 to 1962; the couple had one son. In her 2006 autobiography, Telling Some Tales, published by Hutchinson, she described the difficulties of that marriage, including Brett's struggle with bipolar disorder. She met Russian-born metallurgist Uri Andres at a dinner party in August 1988 and married him in November of that year, remaining with him until her death. In the New Year's Honours List of 31 December 2004, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to drama. Massey died of lung cancer in Kensington, London, on 3 July 2011, at the age of seventy-three.