From Mick Jagger to Crossroads: the pioneering career of Cleo Sylvestre

Although named after a Shakespeare heroine, Cleopatra Sylvestre – more often known personally and professionally as Cleo – had to wait until very late in a long career to play one of the playwright’s women on a major stage. Last year, she was cast at Stratford-upon-Avon as Audrey in As You Like It, in a touching production using the conceit of older actors recreating a Royal Shakespeare Company show they appeared in decades before.

As the programme noted that this was the RSC debut of Sylvestre, who has died aged 79, it was clear the framing device was fake. And, given the talent and success of an actor who made her West End debut aged 19, the belated bestowal of such a role is a measure of the obstacles that actors of colour long faced in the UK.

The gaps are even more striking because Sylvestre’s career had initially seemed fast-tracked. The daughter of a Yorkshire dancer, she turned the family kitchen table in north London into her first stage, dancing on it as a child, and enrolled at the Italia Conti juvenile theatre school. Aged 16, she bunked off from double biology to record a song with the Rolling Stones. A cover of To Know Him Is to Love Him, it was released in 1964, under the name Cleo. This proved a false start artistically, but Mick Jagger reported being “so sad” at the death of his “old friend”, who stands in pop history as the first woman to record with the Stones.

There were also other striking early breakthroughs. In 1967, aged only 19, she acted alongside Alec Guinness in the London West End in Wise Child, the first play by Simon Gray. Two years later, she became the first black woman to play a lead role at the National Theatre – in Peter Nichols’ comedy The National Health – and, in the same period, achieved the equivalent of that breakthrough in a major TV soap opera, with a recurring role in ATV’s Crossroads.

In a 2015 letter to the Guardian after the death of the TV show’s creator, Hazel Adair, Sylvestre wrote: “It was not long after Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech. At a time when racial tension was quite high, especially in places such as Birmingham where the show was based, the decision to introduce a main character who was black was unprecedented and a brave decision for a soap that was sometimes ridiculed.”

Through no fault of her performances, much ridicule also attended her other launch platforms. In Wise Child, Guinness played a criminal blackmailed into pretending to be the mother of a young man. Gray, who had a sideline in diaries and articles about his playwriting disasters, reported customers demanding their money back in the interval as Guinness did not seem to be in the play. One couple, who had realised he was playing the heroine, shouted, “Sir Alec, how could you?” as they walked out.

But, though playing a role that the dramatist himself dismissed as “a simple-minded cockney West Indian”, Sylvestre impressed enough to receive an acting award nomination and a dressing room visit from Sir Laurence Olivier, artistic director of the National Theatre, who gushed, she would recall in the perfect “Larry” imitation that all actors of her generation had: “Oh, Miss Sylvestre, I’d just like to congratulate you on the most wonderful performance.”

Two years later, she was at the National in Nichols’ comedy about the NHS. In both The National Health and Crossroads, Sylvestre played nurses. This would now be seen as stereotyping – although it reflected one of the great contributions of immigration to the UK – but the point was that the roles were of a size being written at the time only for white actors.

In interviews, Sylvestre continued to be grateful to Olivier for the break. It is not clear, though, if she was aware of a shocking complication in his patronage. Published in 2013, The National Theatre Story, the organisation’s official history, endorsed a story told in Nichols’ Diaries 1969-1977 (2000). Using language that would have appalled many then and is completely abhorrent now, Olivier is reported to have said, after the first night of The National Health: “Much as I admire the negro races, I’m not great admirer of their histrionic abilities … D’you think the regular girls in the company should black up?”

Such attitudes may explain why, in theatre, Sylvestre never subsequently developed quite the momentum that her early successes suggested, although later National Theatre administrations treated her much better. In 2021, she sparkled in a stage version of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, and the former NT boss Sir Nicholas Hytner cast her, in 2018, in Alan Bennett’s hospital-set play Allelujah at his Bridge Theatre, where she had graduated from nurse to patient.

On TV, Sylvestre was in regular demand for character parts from Z Cars in 1967 via Grange Hill in 1979 to Platform 7 and All Creatures Great and Small as recently as last year.

In an interview late in her career, she was asked for advice for the next generations of her profession and replied: “To young actors, I would say acting must be a passion; there will be rejection, but that ‘dream job’ is waiting around the corner.”

It was a characteristically generous response from someone who – due to the slowness of cultural change in British show business – faced much rejection and was denied many of the dream jobs that her pioneering achievements make possible for those who follow her.