Barbara Leigh-Hunt, superb stage actress with RSC and Old Vic and on screen in Hitchcock’s Frenzy

Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who has died aged 88, was one of the most accomplished classical actresses of her generation in the British theatre. A comedienne and tragedienne of the front rank, she brought wit and intelligence, elegance and authority to her performances.

While she appeared to a mass audience on the television screen, it was on the stage that she did her finest work. This ranged from a sad, bewildered Ophelia in the mid-1960s, excelling at what one critic called “the fearful honesty of Ophelia’s dementia and her heart-rending courtesies in the Mad scene”; an exceptional Belvidera in the Prospect Theatre Company’s Venice Preserv’d (1970), when she adopted “the grand manner” without over-acting; to a hilarious Lady Bracknell (Birmingham Rep, then Old Vic, 1995) in The Importance of Being Earnest, which attracted rave reviews.

As the Telegraph’s critic Charles Spencer commented, the famous scene in which Lady Bracknell interviews Jack Worthing was “carried out with blissful aplomb, and she ingeniously solves the handbag problem. She is so appalled by Jack’s improbable history that this most vocal of women is temporarily speechless, and is capable only of mouthing the word, twice. When her voice is restored it is a strangulated squeak of outrage, as if Jack had confessed to a fondness for rough trade.”

An actress of almost purely classical ambition, Barbara Leigh-Hunt rarely appeared in the West End or in films because she was in such steady demand, at various periods, by the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Old Vic, the Bristol Old Vic, the Prospect Theatre Company and the Birmingham Repertory Company.

Her most notable big-screen role was in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), in which she played the kindly ex-wife of a former RAF man, played by Jon Finch, who is accused of her murder. As it was her first film, she was terrified, but the considerate Hitchcock had her chair placed beside his on the studio floor, and was thrilled when she cottoned on to his “corny” sense of humour. “Once when we’d sat through a terribly slow rehearsal he said: ‘Too many dog’s feet! What do I mean?’ ” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Pawses’…”

The X-rated Frenzy was Hitchcock’s first film after the demise of the censorship laws, and the strangulation of Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s character by the “necktie killer” is particularly unpleasant, ending with her tongue lolling out of the corner of her mouth.

Reflecting on the film’s explicit violence, she said: “They wanted to know if I was going to be upset. But I’d just played Lady Macbeth on stage so I didn’t see how I could honestly object.

“About a week before, Hitch said, ‘You’ve no objection to baring your breasts, have you?’ I told him I certainly did, and in the end that scene and Anna Massey’s nude scene were with body doubles. Barry Foster was playing the attacker and he and I discussed what we wanted to do. The assault as written was physically implausible, so Hitch told us what he wanted on screen and he was happy to leave to us some of the detail.

“But it was his idea that at the end I should be seen with my tongue lolling out – which in fact I couldn’t do, so it’s a freeze-frame… It’s still a controversial scene even today, but I believe it was utterly necessary to show how hideous a man the murderer was and what he was prepared to do to women.”

A distant relative of Leigh Hunt, the 19th-century writer and friend of John Keats, Barbara Leigh-Hunt was born in Bath on December 14 1935 to Chandos Leigh-Hunt and his wife Elizabeth. Educated at Kensington High School in Bath, she trained for the stage at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and made her first BBC radio broadcast aged 12 on Children’s Hour. While still a student she made her professional debut in the Bristol Old Vic’s 1953 Christmas Show, The Merry Gentleman, written and composed by three members of the company, Dorothy Reynolds, James Cairncross and Julian Slade.

Joining the Old Vic Company, she toured as a walk-on in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, visiting the Edinburgh Festival in 1953, and made her Broadway debut later that year in the same tour.

After rep seasons at Lowestoft and Colwyn Bay she rejoined the Old Vic for a tour of Europe and North America in minor roles, graduating in 1959-60 to Maria in Twelfth Night, Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and what one critic called “a witty and sympathetic Portia” in The Merchant of Venice, “intelligent and interesting, with a gift for new-minting old phrases”.

After a stint at Nottingham Playhouse, where her roles included Viola in Twelfth Night, she returned to the Bristol Old Vic for six seasons in leading parts including Shaw’s Saint Joan, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Lady Macbeth, and Ann Whitefield in Shaw’s Man and Superman. She transferred to the West End in two new plays – Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head (Criterion, 1963) and Frank Marcus’s Mrs Mouse, Are You Within? (Duke of York, 1968).

From Bristol she also toured with the company to Europe and Israel as Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1964), as Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer (Bath Festival, 1965), as Saint Joan and as Victoria in William Francis’s biographical drama Portrait of a Queen (1965); touring in America and Europe she was Isabella in Measure for Measure and Ophelia to (her soon-to-be husband) Richard Pasco’s Hamlet in Tyrone Guthrie’s 1967 productions.

Joining Prospect Theatre, a subsidised company formed to tour the classics, she appeared in Don Juan in Love (1973) and The Grand Tour (Brighton Festival, 1975).

Meanwhile, in London she played Maggie in Frank Marcus’s The Formation Dancers (Hampstead, 1971); Amanda in Private Lives at Bristol (1973); Madge Larrabee in Sherlock Holmes for the RSC at the Aldwych, which also toured to Broadway; and Nadya Krupskaya in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1974).

Other work with the RSC included Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor; Queen Elizabeth in Richard III; Paulina in The Winter’s Tale; Helena in Troilus and Cressida; Goneril to Donald Sinden’s King Lear; Howard Barker’s That Good Between Us; Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour; Queen Margaret in Richard III; Gertrude in Hamlet; The Hollow Crown; and Pleasure and Repentance. In 1981 she appeared with her husband Richard Pasco in the RSC productions of Ostrovsky’s The Forest and Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde.

Back with the Bristol Old Vic she played Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull (1978). Theatre tours included Lonsdale’s Canaries Sometimes Sing (1979); Shaw’s Getting Married; Christopher Fry’s One Thing More; Or Caedmon Construed, and Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance.

Among her credits at the National Theatre in the 1980s and 1990s were Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair; Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance; David Hare’s Racing Demon and The Absence of War; and Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, for which she won a 1993 Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Her television work included The Siegfried Idyll, Search for the Nile, Macbeth, Love Lies Bleeding, One Chance in Four, Cold Feet, All for Love, Paying Guests, Tumbledown, A Perfect Hero, The Best Man to Die and Anna Lee. In the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice she played Lady Catherine de Bourgh and she brought class to prime-time dramas including Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders.

Her films and TV movies included Henry VIII and His Six Wives, A Bequest to the Nation, Oh, Heavenly Dog, Paper Mask, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Billy Elliott (as the vice-principal, 2000), The Martins, Iris, Bertie and Elizabeth, and finally Vanity Fair in 2004.

A frequent broadcaster, she made many recordings, including a selection from the Psalms with John Gielgud, Peter Orr and her husband – they also did poetry recitals together; with Gielgud she also recorded  a selection of love lyrics.

Barbara Leigh-Hunt married Richard Pasco in 1967 and became stepmother to his son; Richard Pasco died in 2014.

Barbara Leigh-Hunt, born December 14 1935, died September 16 2024