Mary Barclay

Mary Barclay (20 July 1916 – 19 February 2008) was an English actress whose career spanned film, television, and theatre across Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Born Mary Biddulph in Williton, Somerset, she achieved a double first in Classics from Cambridge University before pursuing a path in the performing arts. After being rejected by the Civil Service Board, she relocated to London, where she lived with the mother of Ivor Novello. During that period, Novello's mother taught her piano and singing, and Barclay worked at the HMV music store on Oxford Street. She subsequently enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama around the start of the Second World War, and in 1940 she married Richard Barclay, who would later work as a BBC film editor.

Following the war, the couple emigrated to Canada, where Barclay began her acting career. Her first role came in the 1948 Canadian drama Sins of the Fathers, and she went on to play a prostitute in the Canadian production of Tit-Coq (Little Rooster), also beginning in 1948, remaining with that production for three years. Her Broadway debut came in The Hollow by Agatha Christie, and that appearance opened the door to further stage work in New York as well as appearances on American television, including a role in Florence Nightingale. Between 1951 and 1954 she appeared on Broadway in Ti-Coq and Witness for the Prosecution, with the latter staged at the Henry Miller Theatre in New York City in 1955.

Barclay and her husband returned to Britain in 1956, after which she maintained an active presence across stage, film, and television. She became particularly well known for portraying Stella Dane, an overbearing mother-in-law, in the television series Crossroads during the 1960s. After eighteen months in the role, she requested that the producers kill off her character, which they did. Her film work during this period included a role as Jon Voight's mother in The Revolutionary in 1970, followed by the controversial Sex and the Other Woman in 1972, a film that British censors cut by nine minutes. In 1973 she appeared in A Touch of Class alongside Glenda Jackson and George Segal. Her television credits also included Dixon of Dock Green, Steptoe and Son, and Spy Trap. From 1977 to 1979 she played Sophie Chantal in Secret Army, a series set in Belgium during the Second World War.

Richard Barclay died of a heart attack in 1985, and in 1987 Mary married her second husband, David Taylor, a Scottish widower. She died on 19 February 2008 in a nursing home in Guernsey at the age of 91, having suffered complications from a stroke that had occurred seven years before her death.