My mother, Sue Laurie, who has died aged 86, was the embodiment of the wounded healer. Tall, with a long back (she was known as “Stringy” at school), Sue suffered from lower back pain for years until she discovered the Alexander technique, a form of movement therapy. Understanding how inhibiting habitual actions and retraining her movements could radically improve her back problems changed her life.
In the 1970s Sue trained with Bill and Marjory Barlow, the founders of the Alexander Institute, mastered the technique and became a teacher herself. She always stayed true to the original principles and in a long career she introduced hundreds of people to the benefits of what she had learned.
But, like Frederick Alexander himself, it was her work with actors that brought full realisation of the power of the technique. In 1982 she persuaded the Royal Shakespeare Company and then in 1988 the National Theatre of the benefits it would bring to the actors on stage. For more than 30 years, her small room backstage became, in the words of her pupils, a place of quiet safety, a refuge from the stresses of their work. She helped actors in both companies understand how becoming aware of what their bodies were doing could materially improve not just their physical but also their mental approach.
She was welcomed into rehearsals by directors, themselves also often her pupils, to understand how each individual encountered their physical challenges. She was particularly proud to have worked with the actor/puppeteers during the production of War Horse. And Antony Sher, taking the role of Richard III in 1985, was eternally grateful for learning from Sue how to play a hunchback without hurting himself.
Sue was born in Norwich, and grew up in Fakenham, Norfolk, the elder child of a local bank manager, Jack Dring, and his wife, Betty. She escaped the rural life at 16, and after a spell in New York was soon in London at art school, enjoying the bohemian life of Chelsea. In 1959, she married Dick Laurie, creative director in an advertising agency, whom she met picking grapes in the south of France, and they set up home in Barnes, south-west London, where she lived for the rest of her life.
Towards the end of her career as an Alexander teacher, my mother decided to write a book. She was always keen on a good gadget, and the book’s creation saw her traverse the various formats that Apple could offer. Although not a natural writer, she was determined and eventually after several years, the memoir, Touching Lives, was completed and published in 2016, and launched at a National Theatre platform event.
Although my parents’ marriage ended in divorce, they remained friends until Dick’s death in 2020. Sue is survived by their children, Daniel, Tom and me, and grandchildren, Samuel, Emelia, Jacob, Joe and Daisy.
