Susan Fleetwood, actress, born September 21, 1944, died September 29
SUSAN FLEETWOOD, who has died of cancer at the age of 51, was an
actress on whom many a current drama student might model a successful
career. She devoted herself to the stage, but did not shun television.
She picked her few film roles carefully. She worked with the top
companies in the country and helped establish a continuing one some 30
years ago.
Her death at a young age has not only deprived the theatre-going
public of the joys of seeing her in older roles, but also probably
denied her the widespread public recognition she deserved and which
often comes late in life.
For many people, her face will be most familiar from her work on
television, particularly in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and
particularly as policewoman Kate Phillips in Chandler & Co. Given her
classical theatre background, she was a natural for The Jewel In The
Crown and the BBC adpatation of Jane Austen's Persuasion. The same
casting turn of mind gave her roles in the films Heat and Dust and White
Mischief, but she was equally at home in The Krays or, particularly,
Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice.
But it was as a stage actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company and
the National Theatre that Fleetwood will be most fondly remembered by
colleagues and fans. Born in St Andrews in 1944, she was the daughter of
an Army family and the family moved around a great deal, including a
pre-Suez stint in Egypt (where she made her stage debut in a children's
show), and a period in Norway where her father had a Nato job and she
appeared as Joseph in a school production of the biblical story.
The itinerant lifestyle has been noted to foster restless artists and
while her brother Mick went on to form the most successful blues band of
the period, Fleetwood Mac, Susan Fleetwood was sent to a convent school
after failing her 11-plus and from there won a scholarship to the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Arts at the age of 16.
At college she met Terry Hands, who was to be her partner for nine
years and important influence on her life, and began Shakespearian
career, playing Lady Macbeth, and Rosalind in As You Like It on tour in
Tuscon and Phoenix, Arizona. Hands was Orlando. Back in Britain the pair
were part of a group who established the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool,
with a classical repertoire which would be familiar to fans of the
Citizens' in the 1980s and Fleetwood both acting and adminstrating the
company.
Three years later she and Hands went to the RSC and apart from
sojourns with the Prospect and Cambridge Theatre Companies, she remained
there for 10 years. Only a year after her arrival her interpretation of
the role of Regan in King Lear insured that everything she did
subsequently was eagerly noted. In the early seventies her performance
as Portia in The Merchant of Venice, succeeding Judy Dench, a
controversial scene where she simulated orgasm in Hands's production of
Murder in the Cathedral, and her Katherine in The Taming Of The Shrew,
opposite Alan Bates, rewarded the attention.
At the National (which she joined after Peter Hall succeeded Laurence
Olivier) she was the only English actor -- in the central role of Pegeen
Mike -- in an all-Irish production of The Playboy of the Western World.
There was Irish blood on both sides of her family, certainly, but she
repeated the solo trick as Nora in O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars a
few years later. In between she was Ophelia to Albert Finney's Hamlet, a
role she had also played memorably opposite Ian McKellen with the
Cambridge Theatre Company.
With that company she had also played Nina in the Seagull, and in the
nineties she played Arkadina in the same play at Stratford, a
performance described in The Herald as ''consummate -- beautiful,
passionate, assured, yet with an underlying, driven restlessness''. Her
performance in Much Ado About Nothing from the same season was ''a
deliciously frolicsome Beatrice, executing little kicks and leaps of
delight to express her joy in life''.
Despite her extrovert nature in theatrical company, Susan Fleetwood
remained a solitary person and she never married although her life
included several long relationships.
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