Barbara Leigh-Hunt dies aged 88 after legendary career as actress in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy and West End shows

LEGENDARY actress Barbara Leigh-Hunt has died aged 88.

The performing icon passed away peacefully on September 16 at her home in Warwickshire, her family announced.

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Barbara was one of the victims of Barry Foster’s Necktie Murderer in Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, Frenzy.

She played the kindly ex-wife of a former RAF man, played by Jon Finch, who is accused of her murder.

The British star also was known for her performance as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the acclaimed 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.

Her film resume included Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), Bequest to the Nation (1973), Joe Camp’s Oh Heavenly Dog (1980), Paper Mask (1990), A Merry War (1997), Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000) and Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair (2004).

While she appeared to a mass audience on the television screen, it was arguably on the stage that she did her finest work.

During her seven-decade career, Leigh-Hunt appeared for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, in the West End and on Broadway.

Her versatility was also seen in her performance of hilarious Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, which attracted rave reviews.

She received her Olivier in 1993 for her turn as Sybil Birling in an NT revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, directed by Stephen Daldry.

She also portrayed a sad bewildered Ophelia in the mid-1960s as well as Belvidera in the Prospect Theatre Company’s Venice Preserv’d in 1970.

Barbara was born in Bath, Somerset, on December 14 1935.

She graduated from Bristol Old Vic theater school in 1953 and a year later made her theatrical debut in London with the Old Vic.

Barbara travelled with the company to Broadway to appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1954 and in Hamlet and King Henry V in 1958 to 1959.

In the 1970s, she acted in Travesties, King Lear and Sherlock Holmes, which she accompanied to Broadway in 1973.

She was married to actor Richard Pasco from 1967 until his 2014 death.

Donations in her memory can be made to The Royal Theatrical Fund here.

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