1 week Ago By Jackie Strause
Jean Marsh, the sleek British actress who co-created Upstairs, Downstairs and won an Emmy for her performance as the prim and proper parlormaid Rose Buck on the acclaimed ITV drama, has died. She was 90. Marsh died Sunday at home in London from complications of dementia, Marsh’s close friend filmmaker, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, told the New York Times .
Doctor Who historians know Marsh for her portrayal of Sara Kingdom, who ably assists William Hartnell’s Doctor in his fight against the mutant Daleks, on the third season of the BBC sci-fi series in 1965-66. A year earlier, she had played King Edward’s French princess sister, Joanna, on the show’s “The Crusade” serial, then returned as the ruthless enchantress Morgaine for 1989’s “Battlefield” storyline. On American TV shows, the London native starred as an android brought to an asteroid to keep a prisoner (Jack Warden) company on 1959’s “The Lonely,” the seventh episode of CBS’ The Twilight Zone , and she was the self-described “office bitch” Roz in 1982-83 on ABC’s adaptation of 9 to 5 .
The green-eyed Marsh also worked on the big screen, playing Octavia, wife of Richard Burton’s Mark Antony, in Cleopatra (1963); a secretary to Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s character in Frenzy (1972), the penultimate film from Alfred Hitchcock ; a Nazi collaborator in John Sturges’ The Eagle Has Landed (1976); and vile witches in Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985) and Ron Howard’s Willow (1988). She frequently acted on West End stages and made three trips to Broadway , where she starred alongside the likes of John Gielgud, Celeste Holm and Tom Conti. Marsh and her best friend, actress Eileen Atkins — both came from working class backgrounds — created Upstairs, Downstairs , set in a large London country house at 165 Eaton Place that was home to an aristocratic British family.
She played the “downstairs” maid Rose on all five seasons from 1971-75 as the London Weekend Television series spanned the years 1903-30. Marsh was nominated for the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama/limited series for three straight years, winning in 1975. “I think it’s absolutely smashing of everybody here to do with the Emmys in California and all across the country to give me, a foreigner, this award,” she said in her acceptance speech at the Hollywood Palladium.
“It’s generous and unchauvinistic and typically American.” Marsh returned as Rose, now promoted to housekeeper, for the BBC reboot of Upstairs, Downstairs in 2010-12 (and was Emmy nominated again) but appeared only briefly after suffering a minor stroke. She was the only actor to have appeared in both the original and revived versions.
Once asked if she owned a piece of Upstairs, Downstairs , she replied : “I get a residual for the idea as much as I get a residual for the acting. It’s a very low fee. I think I got something like $100 an episode initially for the idea, and my royalty is based on that rate.
I’ve got a saying: ‘If it had been made in America, I’d be Mary Tyler Moore. As it is, I’m Mary Tyler Less.'” The younger of two daughters, Jean Lyndsey Torren Marsh was born in London on July 1, 1934.
Her mother, Emma, was a barmaid and her father, John, worked the press for a newspaper. “They were both in those days very keen on the arts, and they brought me up to have a great respect for words,” she said in 1997 . As a child, she was “paralyzed a couple of times, I think [once] it was a mental paralysis” and also suffered from Bell’s palsy.
Her folks sent her to a dancing school thinking exercise would make her stronger. She also spent a lot of time with books, and “it was the first time I remember thinking, ‘I like reading so much, I wonder if I could write?'” Marsh attended the Aida Foster Theatre School (actress Jean Simmons had gone there), danced in the West End in a Christmas show and made her acting debut opposite Sonnie Hale in the play Pardon My Claws , in which she played a woman who becomes a cat. After several years in repertory theater, Marsh arrived on Broadway in 1959, appearing as Hero opposite Gielgud (who also directed) on Broadway in Much Ado About Nothing .
Also that year, she appeared with Laurence Olivier in the NBC telefilm The Moon and Sixpence and on The Twilight Zone . Her Sara Kingdom met her end on Doctor Who when she was hit by a poisonous bullet that caused her to age rapidly and turn to dust. “The first shot of me was looking a little bit older and then trying to run away from my pursuers and getting [more and more] older,” she recalled in 2013.
“And each time I would go back to makeup and they would out more lines on my face. Then finally I was so old that they cast a really old woman who was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor.” Marsh guest-starred on Danger Man , I Spy and The Saint and was a regular on the Ian Hendry-starring The Informer , then played a waitress in Charlie Bubbles (1967), starring and directed by Albert Finney.
Her payment on the film was a case of champagne, and when she had to come back for a second day, he threw in a bottle of brandy, she said. For Upstairs, Downstairs, Marsh and Atkins “simply wanted to show what went on below stairs, [the people who are] serving the rich upstairs,” she said in a 1998 interview . “So you would see the beautiful people and then you would go downstairs to the steamy kitchen and see what it was like to slave.
[The servants] didn’t have equal time — I think two-thirds of the time was upstairs — but we had equal value.” She and Atkins created another period piece, the 1991-94 BBC drama The House of Eliott , about two sisters (Stella Gonet, Louise Lombard) who are dressmakers in 1920s London. Marsh returned to Broadway in 1975 to star with Holm, June Havoc and Richard Gere in Habeas Corpus and in 1979 to play opposite Conti in Whose Life Is It Anyway? More recently, she was in West End revivals of Boeing Boeing in 2007 and The Portrait of a Lady , directed by Peter Hall, in 2008.
Her résumé included the films The Rebel (1961), Unearthly Stranger (1964), The Limbo Line (1968), Dark Places (1973), The Changeling (1980) and Monarch (2000); a turn as a nasty Nazi actress in the 1994 HBO telefilm Fatherland ; and work on the British TV comedies No Strings and Sensitive Skin . Marsh also wrote several novels, including two based on The House of Eliott on the heels of her series; Fiennders Keepers; and Iris . “When I write I am never really sure where the story is going,” she said .
“The only way I can describe the process is that my characters sometimes do things without my permission. When I was writing Fiennders Keepers , one of them died without my permission and I remember being quite upset. I had to take a break and have a glass of wine.
” She was awarded an OBE in 2012. Marsh, who never had children, was married to ’70s Doctor Who star Jon Pertwee, who was 15 years her senior, from 1955 until their 1960 divorce. She later had romantic relationships with Finney, actor Kenneth Haigh and Lindsay-Hogg.
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