Roberta Taylor

Born: February 26, 1948

Died: July 6, 2024

Roberta Taylor, who has died aged 76, was an actress of huge presence and authority who appeared numerous times at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. She later became a familiar face on television, with regular roles in BBC soap EastEnders (1997-2000) and ITV police drama, The Bill (1984-2010). Latterly she had a regular role in comedy drama, Shakespeare amd Hathaway: Private Investigators (2018-2022).

Taylor brought a husky-voiced grandeur to her inherent common touch in all three of her major small screen roles. In EastEnders she was Irene Raymond, the mercurial matriarch romantically entangled with Gavin Richards’s Terry Raymond. Irene and Terry’s marriage ended in the Christmas Day 1999 episode, when Irene’s extra marital affair with a toy boy was discovered. In The Bill, she was Inspector Gina Gold, an iron lady who made Sun Hill police station her fiefdom. In Shakespeare and Hathaway, Taylor was flamboyantly clad theatrical costume shop owner Gloria Fonteyn.

Taylor’s playing of all three roles might arguably be said to have been a product both of her background growing up surrounded by powerful women, and of her time at the Citz. Arriving in Glasgow in 1976 when the Gorbals-based emporium was at its most provocative peak, Taylor made her professional stage debut in a production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “sung ballet”, The Seven Deadly Sins. In keeping with the show’s themes, Taylor’s costume consisted of little more than fancy underwear and a bunch of balloons she popped throughout the show.

Taylor followed this in a production of In Lermontov’s Maskerade, also in 1976, in which she wore a necklace so big it “brought blood,” as she put it in an interview. This set the tone for things to come, with Taylor appearing at the Citz in more than 16 productions across three decades.

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Roberta Taylor was born Roberta Alexandra Mary Roberts in Plaistow, east London, the result of a liaison between her mother, Winifred Roberts, a clippy on the trolley buses, and Robert Archer, a married bus conductor. She was brought up on the Isle of Dogs by her mother, aunts and her domineering grandmother, Mary. She went to St Luke’s church primary school and Humphrey Gilbert secondary school, all the while lapping up 1940s films and dreaming of being an actress.

“I wanted to play the gangster’s moll and wear bright nail varnish,” Taylor told The Glasgow Times in 2014. “But of course, when you’re from a working class family, that’s never likely to happen.”

Taylor left school without any qualifications and worked in a series of secretarial jobs. In 1966, she married Victor Taylor, a ropemaker, and the couple had a son, Elliot, the same year. While training to be a dental nurse, after Elliot was born, and encouraged by her mother who suggested she get out of the house for a break, Taylor started taking acting classes at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel.

Advised by a friend on Portobello Road to apply for drama school, Taylor applied for the London-based Central School of Speech and Drama in 1973. As fate would have it, also auditioning the same day was Peter Guinness. The couple were together for 20 years before they married in 1996.

Over a decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Taylor became something of a fixture at the Citz. She appeared in A Waste of Time (1984), Philip Prowse’s epic staging of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, in which Gary Oldman and Rupert Everett played her servants. This was followed by turns in French Knickers (1984), Private Lives (1984), Faust (1985), and An Ideal Husband (1986). She later appeared in The Representative (1988) and Hidden Fires (1988).

In 1990, Taylor appeared alongside Glenda Jackson in the Citzs’ City of Culture year production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Throughout the 1990s, Taylor appeared at the Citz in Design for Living (1991), a studio production of Casanova Undone (1992), Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth (1992), and two more studio productions: In Quest of Conscience (1994) in the theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio, and Song at Twilight (1995) in the Circle Studio.

Around and between all this, Taylor appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Exchange, Manchester, Birmingham Rep, and on the West End. Film and TV work beyond those that made her a household name included supporting roles in Nicolas Roeg’s Roald Dahl adaptation, The Witches (1990), and in Brian Gilbert’s film version of Michael Hastings’ play, Tom & Viv (1994). It was the Citz, however, that seemed to have left its mark the most.

“I loved it here,” Taylor told The Glasgow Times. “You were pushed to look at the storytelling in a slightly different way, and with a bit of fun.”

(Image: Roberta Taylor in Private Lives at the Citizens)

Taylor went on to say how “What I like about the Citz roles was that they broke the moulds. Most theatres employed pretty little feminine women, but up here we all had to be the Bette Davis of our time, the broads, and that’s not what many people wanted in women.”

In 2005, Taylor’s memoir, Too Many Mothers, was published. The book saw Taylor write of her tough upbringing in London’s real-life East End surrounded by the women who helped shape her.

After almost 20 years in TV, Taylor returned to the Citz to play Gertrude in current artistic director Dominic Hill’s 2014 production of Hamlet. Appearing opposite Guinness as Claudius, Taylor cut a dangerously formidable figure.

Taylor returned to the Citizens in 2017 when she took part in an edition of Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, in which she explored her theatrical alma mater on prime time TV. Her final stage appearance came in 2018 in Jonathan Harvey’s musical, Dusty, in which she played Dusty Springfield’s mother. It was another powerful woman in a lifetime of calling the shots.

Taylor is survived by her husband, Peter Guinness, her son from her first marriage, Elliot, a granddaughter, Ellis, and two stepbrothers, Bill and Lionel.

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