Lynn Farleigh

Lynn Farleigh, born Marilyn J. Farleigh on 3 May 1942 in Bath, Somerset, is an English actress whose career has spanned stage, television, and film. The daughter of Joseph Sydney Farleigh and his wife Marjorie Norah (née Clark), she received her secondary education at Redland High School for Girls in Bristol before training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Farleigh's professional stage debut came in May 1962 in a production of Under Milk Wood at the Salisbury Playhouse. In October 1966 she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, taking on the role of Castiza in The Revenger's Tragedy at Stratford-upon-Avon. The following April, she traveled to New York with the RSC for her Broadway debut, playing Ruth in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the Music Box Theatre. The production opened in 1967 and marked her sole Broadway credit.

Returning to Britain, Farleigh continued her association with the RSC at the Aldwych Theatre, where she appeared as Helena in the company's revival of All's Well That Ends Well in January 1968, followed by Amanda in The Relapse in August 1968 and Portia in Julius Caesar in November 1968. In July 1969 she appeared at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in a Peter Tegel double-bill, playing the Biology Mistress in Blim at School and Anna in Poet of the Anemones. The following year brought two further notable stage engagements: the role of Simone in Arnold Wesker's The Friends, which Wesker also directed at the Round House in March 1970, and Beatrice Justine in James Joyce's Exiles, directed by Harold Pinter at the Mermaid Theatre in November 1970.

On television, Farleigh accumulated credits beginning in 1964 across a wide range of productions. She played Ann Fazakerley in Z-Cars, appeared in Steptoe and Son in 1974, and took roles in series including Bergerac, Bill Brand, Eyeless in Gaza, Bad Girls, Out, and Murder Most English, as well as the 1978 miniseries The Word. She portrayed Krupskaya opposite Patrick Stewart's Lenin in the BBC historical drama Fall of Eagles, and played the glamorous Vivien Ashton, codenamed Solange, in the second series of the LWT spy drama Wish Me Luck, broadcast in 1989. From 1996 to 1998 she was a regular on the crime series Wycliffe, in which she played Helen Wycliffe. In 1995 she appeared as Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Bennet's sister, in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and between 2013 and 2014 she played Nora White in EastEnders.

Her film work includes Three into Two Won't Go (1969) and Voices (1973), and she provided the voice of the cat in the 1978 animated film Watership Down. In 2021 she contributed to and participated in a YouTube documentary tribute to Alfred Burke titled Alfred Burke is Frank Marker.

Farleigh married three times. Her first marriage, to actor Michael Jayston in 1965, ended in divorce in 1970. She married actor David Yip in 1989, and that marriage also ended in divorce. In 1996 she married actor John Woodvine, who died in 2025.