Pat Heywood obituary

The actor Pat Heywood, who has died aged 92, was a stalwart of repertory theatres over several decades whose credits also included four of Franco Zeffirelli ’s movies and the 1954 world premiere, at the Bristol Old Vic, of the revue-style musical Salad Days, by Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds.

She appeared in Richard Fleischer ’s brilliantly acted film 10 Rillington Place (1971), as the wife of the murderer John Christie (one of Richard Attenborough ’s outstanding screen performances), with John Hurt as Timothy Evans, who was wrongly convicted and hanged for the murders Christie had committed.

Heywood kept equally fine company on the West End stage in the premieres of Peter Nichols ’ Chez Nous (1974), holding her own with Geraldine McEwan , Albert Finney and Denholm Elliott in Robert Chetwyn ’s classy production about a jovial, then tense, holiday home in Provence; and in Alan Ayckbourn’s acrid comedy of bereavement and false bonhomie, Absent Friends (1975), with Richard Briers , Phyllida Law and Peter Bowles .

Heywood was the staunch and reliable leader of any creative ensemble, and her reputation for being the heart, the backbone, of the regional theatre, stemmed from her earliest days at the Bristol Old Vic and her meeting there with the actor and director Oliver Neville . She shared the rest of her life with him, starting with the Old Vic’s tour to India in 1962.

The couple married in 1964 and thereafter she got involved with, and often appeared in, shows directed by Neville at the Manchester Library theatre (where they instigated a programme of lunchtime shows for shoppers) and then, later in the 1960s, at the Ipswich arts theatre, where the two of them initiated an innovative theatre-in-education programme. When Neville returned to Bristol to work in the university’s drama department, they made a new home in the city.

When he was appointed principal at Rada in London in 1986, Heywood again worked with him, and the students, while managing to maintain a busy career on stage and screen.

She was born in Gretna Green, Dumfries and Galloway, the youngest of five children. Her father, John Heywood, was an engineer, and his work took the family – her mother, Edna (nee Hayward, oddly enough), had her hands full with the children – to Manchester and then Nottingham, where Pat attended West Bridgford grammar school (and where the writer Malcolm Bradbury was a contemporary), but had to leave before completing her exams as the family funds were over-stretched.

She worked in the Nottingham central library and as an auxiliary nurse before joining the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. On completing her course, she was immediately taken on as an actor/assistant stage manager and made her stage debut in the 1952-53 season in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Sheridan’s 18th-century The Duenna, a comic opera with new music by Slade.

Before Salad Days – whose multitasking cast of 12 included Reynolds herself, Alan Dobie and Eric Porter – Heywood was also Dunyasha in The Cherry Orchard in 1953, then moved on to seasons in the late 50s in Nottingham, Oxford and Hornchurch, east London.

Then back to the Bristol Old Vic, and the fateful tour to India, before making her film debut as the Nurse in Zeffirelli’s marvellous Romeo and Juliet (1968). This led to small but pertinent roles in two 1969 films, Stanley Donen ’s Staircase, with Richard Burton and Rex Harrison as an unlikely couple of camp hairdressers, and Guy Hamilton ’s splashy Battle of Britain.

Her West End prominence in the 70s was capped by a wonderfully stern, comic performance in Mary O’Malley ’s award-winning satirical, and inoffensively blasphemous comedy Once a Catholic (1977) at the Royal Court and the Wyndham’s (where it ran for over two years), delivering a final speech as Mother Peter to the departing convent girls: “Remember that God made your bodies for himself … All parts of the body are sacred, but none more so than the parts connected with the mystery of motherhood.”

Heywood joined the National Theatre in 1979 to play in excellent, solid productions of JB Priestley’s When We Are Married and, in 1981, the Victorian melodrama The Ticket-of-Leave Man by Tom Taylor, in which she was memorable as a loquacious granny, said Robert Cushman in the Observer, in a “stunning cast” that included Jack Shepherd, Jane Carr and Paul Copley.

In the early 80s, she returned to the Bristol Old Vic as Paulina – a wonderful role to match her quiet constancy and humanity – in The Winter’s Tale, and as the more lubricious Kath in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. In between, she popped up in one of the West End’s most notorious flops – the Rocky Horror Show writer Richard O’Brien’s Top People (1984) at the Ambassadors, which closed after three performances.

Heywood’s TV work included Nelly Dean in a BBC Wuthering Heights (1978); Molly in Alan Bennett’s beautiful, elegiac series of monologues, Objects of Affection (1982), with Elizabeth Spriggs , Thora Hird and Marjorie Yates; and a cook/housekeeper in Judy Allen’s December Flower (1984, directed by Stephen Frears) about old age and caring, with Jean Simmons and Mona Washbourne, respectively, as a newly widowed niece and her sick aunt.

Other films included a touching coming-of-age sex comedy, Getting It Right (1979), in which she played the concerned mother of an attractive boy (Jesse Birdsall) assailed by women – Lynn Redgrave , Helena Bonham-Carter and Jane Horrocks – on all sides.

Other Zeffirelli collaborations were Young Toscanini (1988), with an over-the-top Elizabeth Taylor as the mistress of a Brazilian emperor; and Sparrow (1993), which had superb cinematography in Catania, Sicily, and also marked the last appearance on celluloid of the great Valentina Cortese .

Oliver died in 2021. Heywood is survived by her stepchildren, Edward and Sarah, from his first marriage.

• Pat (Patricia) Heywood, actor, born 1 August 1931; died 26 June 2024