As posh, privileged Caroline Sterling, the role she played in BBC Radio 4’s The Archers for 40 years, Sara Coward, who has died aged 69, will be remembered by fans of the world’s longest-running soap as a woman both alarmingly horsey and alluringly sexy. She did not have to audition for the part: the programme’s former producer Vanessa Whitburn chanced to see her playing Lady Macbeth in rep in Southampton, recognised the potential of her glorious golden voice and offered her the role.
The new Archers character, Caroline Bone, was to be young, attractive, feisty, unattached and distantly related, by marriage on her mother’s side, to Lord Netherbourne. The news swept through Ambridge like bushfire. For once, no one in the Bull was talking about sheep.
Followers of the series (latest Archers listening figures are around 5 million a week) will be familiar with Caroline’s career in Borsetshire. It started badly with a string of sticky love affairs, including a brief fling with a lothario landowner, Brian Aldridge. But as Ambridge’s famous everyday country folk will tell you, good breeding pays dividends and Caroline, with her cut-glass phonemes, is nothing if not well bred. She rose from junior receptionist at Grey Gables country club, Borchester’s answer to Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, to hotel manager – she has sound business sense as well as class. Her marriage to the landowner Guy Pemberton ended after six months with his sudden death, but in 2005 she married Oliver Sterling after he bought Grey Gables, and thereby became its co-owner. Caroline became an Ambridge fixture, although in the current story-line she and Oliver have dreams of living in Italy and have just found a villa in Tuscany.
Coward had little in common with her Ambridge alter ego, although her own description of the visit in 1984 by Princess Margaret to an Ambridge charity bash hosted by Caroline reveals that actor and Archers character did occasionally collide. After a particularly chilly line rehearsal for the scene, the delighted Coward recalled, “The producer said: ‘That was very good, Ma’am, but could you possibly sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?’ HRH regarded him coldly. ‘Well, why would I be?’ she replied.”
Coward and her two older brothers, John and David, grew up in Eltham, south-east London. She went to the local girls’ grammar school and then to read English and drama at Bristol University. At the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, she won the Carleton Hobbs award, leading to a six-month contract with the BBC drama department. Her television appearances included Rumpole of the Bailey, Inspector Morse and many other popular series, sitcoms and plays.
Among her stage roles on tour and in London were Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Amanda in Private Lives and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. The performance of which she was most proud was Vera in A Month in the Country, opposite Dorothy Tutin at the Albery (now Noël Coward) theatre in London in 1975-76. One night, when the play had reached a particularly poignant scene, an IRA bomb exploded outside in St Martin’s Lane. “The audience did an intake of breath,” the actor told Radio Times later, “but neither of us missed a beat and everyone soon quietened down. Luckily there were no serious casualties.”
Before she committed to The Archers, Coward moved to France on a whim, lived there for a year and returned speaking fluent French. She had relationships but never married, preferring to share her home with a succession of rescue dogs. The last was a lurcher called Sati. She was a Samaritan volunteer for eight years and became used to callers asking, “Excuse me, aren’t you Caroline in The Archers?”
Friends describe her as generous, elegant, intelligent and funny. She was an enthusiastic host and cook, with an eye for interior design, making everywhere she lived stylish. “Give her a shoebox,” said Sunny Ormond (Lilian Bellamy in The Archers), “and she’d transform it, with minimum props or fuss, into an objet d’art.” Coward and Ormond undertook a Dalmatian coast cruise on which they gave nightly performances of their risque musical two-hander, Wicked Women.
Colleagues remember Coward’s warmth and kindness. She once drove a distressed neighbour 200 miles to see a healer. She was a qualified acupuncturist and practised finger-tip face massage. Her favourite book was the Tao Te Ching by the Chinese mystic Lao Tzu.
Diagnosed with terminal cancer last September and given three months to live, she launched her SM:)E campaign on social media. “We worked out that it would take 2,500 million people standing shoulder to shoulder to form a line 1,000 miles long,” she said. “So we’re asking for a thousand miles of smiles.”
She is survived by her mother and by David.
• Sara Coward, actor, born 30 January 1948; died 13 February 2017
