Lois Sieff, who has died aged 94, was a lifelong enthusiast and supporter of the arts. She was also an irresistibly bright and warm friend.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, daughter of a second-generation Romanian-Jewish construction worker, William Ross, and a factory worker, Lydie Wagner, the descendant of immigrants from Yorkshire and Germany. Lois was brought up as a Methodist.
At John Adams high school in Queens she developed a keen interest in music and dance, learning to play the piano and the French horn. She paid for dancing classes by selling eggs from her mother’s chickens.
Lois went to Adelphi College on Long Island, became interested in theatre and got a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse school (home of the Meisner acting technique). She worked in radio and became part of a group of actors, artists and musicians among whom was a British composer, Richard (“Tony”) Arnell. Their wedding, in 1947, was held in Mark Rothko’s studio.
They moved to London, and had a daughter, Jennifer, but their marriage ended when Arnell left Lois in 1951. A year later, she met Teddy Sieff of the Marks and Spencer dynasty (and future chairman of the company). She converted to Judaism, married him and they had a son, Adam.
Teddy’s brother-in-law, Neville Blond, was the chairman of the English Stage Company, which was started in 1956 by George Devine and Tony Richardson at the Royal Court theatre. Lois joined the board and was at the first night of their opening production, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Later, she was instrumental in turning the attic space above the theatre, then used as a restaurant, into the Theatre Upstairs. Later still, she ran the English Stage Society, a fundraising and supporters’ group.
In 1973 Teddy was shot in the face by the terrorist Carlos the Jackal in their house in St John’s Wood, north-west London. Though understandably unnerved, she characteristically had the presence of mind to lock herself in the bedroom and call the police. Her husband survived the attack, saved, he said, by his “Milk Marketing Board teeth”.
Lois was on numerous boards and committees: the National Theatre, the South Bank Foundation, the Royal Opera House, the London Sinfonietta, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the Stephen Spender Trust. She chaired the Fulbright Arts Fellowship, the Anna Freud Centre and the Jerusalem Foundation UK.
She was so much more than a good committee woman: at the NT she argued, successfully, that every staff member should be part of a pension scheme and she virtually invented the euphemism “development” for persuading individuals and companies to part with their cash. She had a strong belief in access through education and in touring nationally and internationally.
She was full of fun and full of gossip, and knew where all the bodies were buried. She became a close friend of Mary Soames when Mary became chair of the National Theatre. “She’s a game gal,” said Lois. It took one to know one.
Teddy died in 1982. Lois is survived by Jennifer and Adam.
