Anna Raymond Massey (11 August 19373 July 2011) was an English actress. She won a BAFTA Best Actress Award for the role of Edith Hope in the 1986 TV adaptation of Anita Brookner's novel Hotel du Lac, a role that one of her co-stars, Julia McKenzie, has said "could have been written for her". Massey is also well known for her roles in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) and Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), each as a woman who becomes involved with a suspected killer. She performed over one hundred character roles in British film and television. On the stage, in 1982, Massey won the Laurence Olivier Award for Actress of the Year in a Supporting Role for The Importance of Being Earnest and was nominated for the Award for Actress of the Year in a New Play for Summer.
Early life
Massey was born in Thakeham, Sussex, England, the daughter of British actress Adrianne Allen and Canadian-born Hollywood actor Raymond Massey. Her parents divorced when she was an infant and she continued to live in England with her mother. Her older brother Daniel Massey also became an actor. She was the niece of Vincent Massey, a Governor General of Canada, and her godfather was film director John Ford. 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. 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. after acquiring the TV rights two years earlier, only a few weeks before the novel won the Booker Prize.
Acting style
One of Massey's assets as an actress was her "extraordinary voice... it was so listenable". Michael Billington of The Guardian characterised her work as being informed by "stillness", such as in the National Theatre's production of Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska. Massey was the principal narrator of the BBC Radio series on British history This Sceptred Isle. She also recorded several audiobooks, including Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.
She was known for a high level of preparation and effort, with one producer saying that she had a practice of using five different coloured pens on scripts to mark out "breaths and pauses" and the development of a scene; for example, "if a phrase early in a paragraph was going to be picked up again later, she would highlight those two bits in the same colour, so that it would remind her that that first phrase was referring to something later".
In 2006 Massey published an autobiography, Telling Some Tales, in which she revealed a difficult early life, including a distant relationship with her father and estrangement from her brother. She also described her failed marriage (1958–1962) to Jeremy Brett, discussing his struggle with bipolar disorder. Brett and Massey divorced on 22 November 1962 after, she claimed, he left her for a man. The couple had one son. At an August 1988 dinner party held at the home of their mutual friend, Joy Whitby, The couple were married from November 1988 until her death in 2011.
She died from lung cancer in Kensington, London on 3 July 2011, aged 73.
|-
|1972
|Frenzy
|Babs Milligan
|
|-
|1973
|The Vault of Horror
|Donna Rogers
|(segment 1 "Midnight Mess")
|-
|1973
|A Doll's House
|Kristine Linde
|
|-
|1974
|The Pallisers
|Laura Kennedy
|TV miniseries
|-
|1978
|The Mayor of Casterbridge
|Lucetta Templeman
|
|-
|1979
|Rebecca
|Mrs Danvers
|TV miniseries
|-
|1979
|A Little Romance
|Ms. Seigel
|
|-
|1980
|Sweet William
|Edna McClusky
|
|-
|1982
|Five Days One Summer
|Jennifer Pierce
|
|-
|1982
|I Remember Nelson
|Lady Frances Nelson
|TV series, Episode: "Love"
|-
|1983
|Mansfield Park
|Mrs Norris
|TV series - 6 episodes
|-
|1984
|Another Country
|Imogen Bennett
|
|-
|1984
|Journey into the Shadows: Portrait of Gwen John
|Gwen John
|TV film
|-
|1984
|The Little Drummer Girl
|Chairlady
|
|-
|1984
|The Chain
|Betty
|
|-
|1985
|Sacred Hearts
|Sister Thomas
|
|-
|1986
|Hotel du Lac
|Edith Hope
|BAFTA award-winning TV role
|-
|1986
|Foreign Body
|Miss Furze
|
|-
|1987
|A Hazard of Hearts
|Eudora, Serena's Maid
|
|-
|1988
|La couleur du vent
|Norma
|
|-
|1988
|Tears in the Rain
|Emily
|
|-
|1989
|The Tall Guy
|Mary
|
|-
|1989
|A Tale of Two Cities
|Miss Pross
|
|-
|1989
|Killing Dad
|Edith
|
|-
|1989
|Around the World in 80 Days
|Queen Victoria
|
|-
|1990
|Mountains of the Moon
|Mrs Arundell
|
|-
|1990
|Killing Dad or How to Love Your Mother
|Edith
|
|-
|1991
|Impromptu
|George Sand's mother
|
|-
|1991
|The Diamond Brothers: South by South East
|Mrs Bodega
|
|-
|1992
|Inspector Morse
|Emily Balcombe
|TV series, Episode: "Happy Families"
|-
|1992
|Emily's Ghost
|Miss Rabstock
|
|-
|1992
|The Darling Buds of May
| Mam’selle Antoinette Dupont
|
|-
|1993
|The Return of the Psammead
| Aunt Marchmont
|
|-
|1995
|The Grotesque
|Mrs Giblet
|
|-
|1995
|Angels & Insects
|Miss Mead
|
|-
|1995
|Haunted
|Nanny Tess Webb
|
|-
|1995
|The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends
|Mrs Thomasina Tittlemouse
|TV series, Episode: "The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and Mrs. Tittlemouse"
|-
|1996
|Sweet Angel Mine
|Mother
|
|-
|1997
|Driftwood
|Mother
|
|-
|1997
|The Slab Boys
|Elsie Walkinshaw
|
|-
|1997
|Deja Vu
|Fern Stoner
|
|-
|1998
|Midsomer Murders
|Honoria Lyddiard
|Episode "Written in Blood"
|-
|1999
|Captain Jack
|Phoebe Pickles
|
|-
|1999
|Mad Cows
|Dwina Phelps
|
|-
|2000
|Room to Rent
|Sarah
|
|-
|2001
|Dark Blue World
|English teacher
|
|-
|2002
|The Importance of Being Earnest
|Miss Prism
|
|-
|2002
|Possession
|Lady Bailey
|
|-
|2003
|Strange
|Emily Hawthorne
|Episode: "Zoxim"
|-
|2004
|The Machinist
|Mrs Shrike
|
|-
|2004
|Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures
|Agatha Christie
|
|-
|2004
|He Knew He Was Right
|Miss Stanbury
|TV film
|-
|2004
|Belonging
|Herself
|TV mini series
|-
|2005
|Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
|Mrs Arbuthnot
|
|-
|2005
|The Worst Week of My Life
|Aunt Yvonne
|
|-
|2006
|The Gigolos
|Edwina
|
|-
|2007
|Fairy Stories by The Brothers Grimm
|Narrator
|Audiobook
|-
|2007
|Lewis
|Margaret Gold
|Episode: "Whom the Gods Would Destroy"
|-
|2007
|Oliver Twist
|Mrs Bedwin
|TV miniseries, 4 episodes
|-
|2008
|Doctor Who – The Girl Who Never Was
|Miss Pollard
|8th Doctor audio drama
|-
|2008
|The Oxford Murders
|Julia Eagleton
|
|-
|2008
|Affinity
|Miss Haxby
|TV film
|-
|2008
|Tess of the D'Urbervilles
|Mrs D'Urberville
|TV miniseries, Episode #1.1
|-
|2009
|Kingdom
|Winifred
|TV series, Episode #3.3
|-
|2009
|Midsomer Murders
|Brenda Packard
|Episode: "Secrets and Spies"
|-
|2010
|Agatha Christie’s Poirot
|Miss Pebmarsh
|Episode: "The Clocks"
|-
|2011
|Act of Memory: A Christmas Story
|Older Maria
|Short (final film role)
|}
Books
See also
- Massey family
References
External links
- Stage performances in Theatre Archive University of Bristol
- Obituary in The Independent
- Obituary in The Telegraph