Edith Macarthur, who has died aged 92, was one of the doyennes of Scottish theatre for half a century but known to audiences across Britain – and worldwide – for being in the original cast of Scotland’s most successful TV soap opera.
She played Elizabeth Cunningham, the benevolent lady laird, in Take the High Road, set in the fictional village of Glendarroch, on the banks of Loch Lomond. It began as a daytime serial on ITV in 1980 but soon enjoyed peak-time screenings in Scotland.
In the programme, Elizabeth’s marriage to Peter, an Edinburgh lawyer, foundered as she concentrated on making the Glendarroch estate viable. Eventually, she sold out to a German consortium but kept a seat on the board. She increasingly spent time in Edinburgh and entrusted her daughter, Fiona, to look after her interests.
In 1986, one of the soap’s biggest shocks came with the death of Elizabeth in a car crash as she headed to hospital to see her newborn grandson. Eight years after Macarthur’s departure the programme’s title was shortened to High Road, and it ran until 2003.
Elizabeth’s “weeks away” in Edinburgh had enabled Macarthur to continue appearing in stage productions, acting in everything from the classics to pantomime. “I enjoy the opportunity to be more than one character,” she said. “The lady laird is so elegant and sophisticated, whereas panto represents the other me.”
Later, in her most moving television performance, Macarthur played Kitty McVurrich in John McGrath’s 1993 play The Long Roads. Kitty and her husband, Peter (played by Robert Urquhart), leave their farm on the Isle of Skye for a final journey around Britain to visit their five children after Kitty is diagnosed with terminal cancer. As they witness their offspring’s varying fortunes, the couple rekindle the love that originally brought them together. “Here’s to the man I’ve waited for all these years,” says Kitty to Peter as they raise their glasses in a plush hotel paid for by a stockbroker son-in-law.
Edith was born in the ferry town of Ardrossan, Ayrshire, to Donald MacArthur (she later chose to lower-case the second “A” in her surname), a civil engineer, and is wife, Minnie (nee Ross). She gained a love of acting through performances in productions at Ardrossan Academy and, while there, joined the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Players amateur group.
Alongside studies at the Royal College of Music, Glasgow, in the mid-1940s, Macarthur worked at the Admiralty’s Chart and Chronometer depot in Saltcoats. She realised her ambition to act professionally when in 1948 she became an assistant stage manager with the Wilson Barrett company, which toured Scotland. Once given a chance to appear in productions herself, she acted alongside future stars such as Tom Fleming and Geoffrey Palmer, as well as Larry Dalzell, who became her agent.
Macarthur progressed to repertory companies at Perth theatre, the Gateway in Edinburgh (both 1956) and Citizens theatre in Glasgow (1957-59) before moving to London in 1960, when she made her West End debut as Mrs Chandler in Alex Coppel’s play The Gazebo, at the Savoy. Then she began two seasons (1960-62) at the Aldwych, in London, and in Stratford-upon-Avon with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where her roles included Lady Montague in Romeo and Juliet.
In the West End, she also played Sister Helena in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Wyndham’s theatre, 1966) and Miss Mackay, the disapproving headteacher, in a revival at the Strand theatre (1994-95).
A return to Scotland to live in Edinburgh on joining Take the High Road saw Macarthur firmly back on home ground in theatres across the country for the next 25 years. Pitlochry Festival audiences saw her in summer seasons between 1988 and 2002, playing “so many wonderful and contrasting roles”, she wrote, such as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. She also appeared as the fairy godmother in Cinderella pantomimes for many years.
The part of June Wilmot in Satan and a House in the Country, a play by Oswald Wynd for the Home Service in 1951, was the first of Macarthur’s dozens of acting roles and readings for BBC radio over almost six decades.
Other notable television parts included Margaret Ker in the 16th-century adventure series The Borderers (1968-70), Jean Guthrie, the tragic mother who cannot face having yet more children, in an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song (1972), Dr Judith Roberts from the second series of Sutherland’s Law (1974-76), Lady Lang in the 1988 three-part thriller about the nuclear industry, Menace Unseen, alongside Ian Ogilvy, and Joan Andrews, the clinical ethicist’s secretary, in the medical drama Life Support (1999). She was appointed MBE in 2000.
Macarthur is survived by her brothers, John and Donald.
• Edith Macarthur, actor, born 8 March 1926; died 25 April 2018
