Myra McFadyen

Born: January 12, 1956;

Died: October 18, 2024

Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen.

Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described her portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking”.

For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. She spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Michael Caton Jones.

More recently, McFadyen played the diminutive Mrs Bates, mother of Miranda Hart’s more statuesque Miss Bates in Autumn de Wilde’s film of Jane Austen’s novel, Emma (2019). Given the height difference between McFadyen and Hart, it was inspired casting.

On stage, McFadyen worked extensively with the National Theatre of Scotland, taking part in the Caithness leg of the company’s inaugural nationwide Home project. She went on to appear in revivals of Chris Hannan’s play, Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, and Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. She also appeared in the NTS’ staging of Andrew O’Hagan’s non-fiction book, The Missing, and Macbeth, the latter starring Alan Cumming. Other NTS credits include Glasgow Girls, Roman Bridge and I Am Thomas.

McFadyen played Hecuba in Theatre Cryptic’s production of Trojan Women, and applied her expressive physicality to Interiors, Vanishing Point’s look at goings-on behind closed doors at a dinner party, which, other than the narrator outside the house, was largely wordless.

Hill directed McFadyen at the Citz in The Choir (2015), Paul Higgins and Ricky Ross’ musical; and in a 2017 production of Noël Coward’s comedy Hay Fever. As the maid, Clara, McFadyen performed a cabaret style melody of Coward songs that became one of the show’s highlights, giving full vent to her beautiful singing voice. Sporting housecoat and slippers, her performance was described in one review as being somewhere between Nora Batty and a Gorbals Piaf.

McFadyen’s small stature, down-to-earth rapport with an audience and easy physicality made her eminently watchable, whether as Puck, or as Winnie in Stewart Laing’s 1996 production of Samuel Beckett’s play, Happy Days. Even though she was buried up to her neck in sand in the latter, a mix of wide-eyed guilelessness and deep-set pathos radiated from her facial expressions alone.

Myra McFadyen was born on West Princes Street, Glasgow, one of three children to Margaret (née Thomson) and Alec McFadyen. Alec was a chef and Margaret a secretary at Prudential insurance before the family moved to Cadder, then Dalmellington after Alec got a teaching job at Ayr Technical College (now part of Ayrshire College), where he eventually became head of catering and hotel management. Margaret taught evening classes in home economics, and at one point had a café in Craigie Park in Ayr.

McFadyen wanted to act from an early age, and while at Prestwick Academy performed in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, and played eccentric medium Madame Arcati in Coward’s Blithe Spirit. She trained at what was then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD), now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and won a scholarship to study physical theatre at L’Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

McFadyen applied these European sensibilities to early appearances with Wildcat, the agit-prop rock music theatre offshoot of 7:84 set up by director/producer David MacLennan and actor/musician Dave Anderson. This was a perfect mix for McFadyen, whose Wildcat credits included Anderson-scripted shows His Master’s Voice (1982) and Welcome to Paradise (1983).

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She went on to appear in Anderson/MacLennan collaboration, Bedpan Alley (1984), and received co-writing credits for Dead Liberty (1984), based around the miner’s strike, and Business in the Backyard (1985), a show about the Nicaraguan revolution. She also appeared in Same Difference (1984), The Crack (1985), and Heather Up Your Kilt (1986).

She thrived in ensembles, frequently cast as sidekicks, servants and assorted wise fools whose presence transformed the action of a play. With Communicado, she played La Corbie in the original production of Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), and was Touchstone in Hamish Glen’s 1988 Royal Lyceum production of As You Like It. Her physical skills also saw her work with the Complicitie company in Anything for a Quiet Life and Out of a House Walked a Man.

At the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, she appeared in Michael Boyd’s celebrated Scots language production of Quebecois writer Michel Tremblay’s The Guid Sisters. At the Traverse, she appeared in Jo Clifford’s play, Ines de Castro, and played Tottie, the teenage “daftie” in Sue Glover’s play, Bondagers, directed by Ian Brown.

She was Dolly in Alex Norton’s Greenwich Theatre production of Talk of the Steamie (1989), Tony Roper’s phenomenal success story originally produced by Wildcat.

(Image: Myra McFadyen)

Later, she played maid Dorine in the Royal Exchange, Manchester’s production of Tartuffe. She had appeared at the Royal Exchange earlier in Phyllida Lloyd’s production of A Winter’s Tale, several years before Lloyd enlisted her for Mamma Mia!

At the National Theatre in London, McFadyen appeared in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, directed by Richard Jones, Square Rounds, overseen by Tony Harrison, and was a Witch in Richard Eyre’s production of Macbeth. With the Royal Shakespeare Company, she was Mrs Noah in Katie Mitchell’s production of The Mysteries, appeared in Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni’s production of Everyman, was Dorcas in The Winter’s Tale under Greg Doran, and Mrs Beaver in Adrian Noble’s take on The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Back in Scotland, she played eccentric governess Charlotte in John Byrne’s update of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Lyceum, where she later appeared in Zinnie Harris’ version of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic, Rhinoceros.

Latterly she played the Ghost of Christmas Past in four runs of Matthew Warchus’ Old Vic production of A Christmas Carol. As with all her work, she played it with a mischievous warmth that made her a unique presence on stage.

She is survived by her brothers, Allan and Lex.

NEIL COOPER

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