Anna Massey

At 73 years old, Anna Massey has this physical status:

Anna Raymond Massey (11 August 1937 – 3 July 2011) was an English actress.

Edith Hope's role in Anita Brookner's 1986 TV adaptation of her book Hotel du Lac, a role for which one of her co-stars, Julia McKenzie, said, "could have written for her."

Early life

Massey was born in Thakeham, Sussex, England, and the niece of British actress Adrianne Allen and Canadian-born Hollywood actor Raymond Massey. Daniel Massey, her brother, was also an actor. She was the niece of Vincent Massey, the Governor General of Canada, and her godfather, John Ford, and she was the niece of film producer John Ford.

Personal life

She was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to drama on the New Year's Honours List, published on December 31, 2004.

Massey released an autobiography in 2006, Telling Some Tales, in which she chronicled her early life and shared her struggle with bipolar disorder (1958-1972). Brett and Massey divorced on November 22, 1962, after she said he left her for a man. David Huggins, writer and illustrator, was the son of the couple (b. 1959 (backgrounds). Uri Andres, a Russian-born metallurgist who had been based at Imperial College, London, since 1975, was a guest at their dinner party on August 1988. The pair were married from November 1988 to her death in 2011.

Massey was quoted as saying, "Theatre eats up so much of your family's life." I have a grandson and a husband, and I'd prefer that I be both a grandmother and a husband."

She died of lung cancer in Kensington, London, on July 3, 2011. She was 73 years old.

Source

Career

Although she had no formal training at either drama school or in repertory, Anna Massey made her first appearance on stage in May 1955 at the age of 17, at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, as Jane in The Reluctant Debutante, subsequently making her first London appearance in the same play at the Cambridge Theatre in May 1955 "and was suddenly famous". She then left the cast in London to repeat her performance in New York in October 1956. In the 1990s she appeared with Alan Bennett in a dramatised reading of T.S. Eliot's and Virginia Woolf's letters, in a production at the Charleston Festival devised by Patrick Garland.

Several of her early film roles were in mystery thrillers. She made her cinema debut in the Scotland Yard film Gideon's Day (1958) as Sally, daughter of Jack Hawkins's Detective Inspector. The director was her godfather John Ford. She played a potential murder victim in Michael Powell's cult thriller Peeping Tom (1960) and appeared in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965). In 1972 she played the role of the barmaid Babs in Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film Frenzy. In the documentary on the film's DVD release, Massey mentioned that she originally auditioned for the much smaller role of the secretary Monica, a part for which Jean Marsh was cast. She also noted that her character's nude scenes in Frenzy were performed by body doubles. She appeared alongside her brother Daniel—they played siblings—in the horror film The Vault of Horror (1973).

Massey continued to make occasional film and stage appearances, but worked more frequently in television. She made her first small-screen appearance as Jacqueline in Green of the Year in October 1955, and thereafter featured in dramas such as The Pallisers (1974), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), the 1979 adaptation of Rebecca (in which she starred with her ex-husband Jeremy Brett), The Cherry Orchard (1980), and Anna Karenina (1985). She had roles in the British comedy series The Darling Buds of May (1991) and The Robinsons (2005). She also appeared in a number of mysteries and thrillers on television, including episodes of Inspector Morse, The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, Midsomer Murders, Strange, Lewis, and Agatha Christie's Poirot.

With Imelda Staunton, she co-devised and starred as Josephine Daunt in Daunt and Dervish on BBC radio. She was the narrator of This Sceptred Isle on BBC Radio 4, a history of Britain from Roman times which ran for more than 300 fifteen-minute episodes. In 2009, she also appeared in a new radio version of The Killing of Sister George.

In 1987, Massey was awarded the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her role in Hotel du Lac after acquiring the TV rights two years earlier, only a few weeks before the novel won the Booker Prize. She also appeared as Mrs D'Urberville in the 2008 BBC adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Source