My friend and former teacher Mary Miller, who has died aged 90, was an actor in theatre and on television, and a founder member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company at the Old Vic in London.
A look through Mary’s huge scrapbooks, bursting with photographs and cards, reveals a vivacious life full of theatrical highlights. In 1981 the then choreographer and artistic director of the Royal ballet, Kenneth MacMillan, cast her in the speaking role of Isadora Duncan, alongside the dancer Merle Park, in his ballet Isadora at the Royal Opera House. For the Royal Shakespeare Company she appeared in Melons (1985), Il Candelaio (1986), and A Christmas Carol (1995), and with the English National Ballet she played the Nurse in Derek Deane’s Romeo and Juliet (1998).
She also made more than 100 appearances in plays and series on television, notably in Dr Finlay’s Casebook (1965). She played Maggie Hobson in a three-part BBC production of Hobson’s Choice (1967) and was a regular cast member in Marty Feldman’s comedy series Marty (1968-69). She played Angela Dunwoody QC in Crown Court (1976-77), and her last television role came in Lynda La Plante’s Trial and Retribution in 2005.
Born in Gorleston-on-Sea, Norfolk, Mary was the daughter of George Spinks, a port, fish and sanitary inspector, and his wife, Edith (nee Moore). During the second world war she was evacuated to Nottinghamshire, where she attended Retford high school before returning home in 1944 to study at the Phyllis Adams School of Dancing in Great Yarmouth.
While working in an Ipswich coffee bar she was “discovered languishing behind a Gaggia machine”, as she put it, by the director Peter Coe, who employed her at the Ipswich theatre for her first professional repertory season. In 1963, as a member of the new National Theatre company, she appeared in The Recruiting Officer, Hobson’s Choice and as Bianca to Olivier’s Othello. In the same year she received a London Critics Award for her performance in Ibsen’s The Master Builder.
Her many West End performances included Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged (1975), directed by Harold Pinter, and Hugh Whitemore’s Pack of Lies (1984). In 1978 she gave a touching performance in Lark Rise at the National Theatre.
As a teacher of drama, Mary worked at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where I first met her in 1975 as a student, and at the Royal Ballet School. She was a source of inspiration to many students, who were excited to be working with a real West End performer who treated them as equals, expecting high standards and encouraging them with her warmth and enthusiasm.
Mary was first married to Hugh Miller and then to the actor Bill Simpson. Both marriages ended in divorce.
She had a quiet retirement, and for the past 11 years had lived at Denville Hall, the actors’ care home in Northwood in north west London.
