Anna Massey

Anna Massey CBE
Massey in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Born	Anna Raymond Massey (1937-08-11)11 August 1937 Thakeham, Sussex, England
Died	3 July 2011(2011-07-03) (aged 73) Kensington, London, England
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1955–2011
Spouses	Jeremy Brett ​ ​ (m. 1958; div. 1962)​ Dr Uri Andres ​ (m. 1988)​
Parent(s)	Raymond Massey Adrianne Allen
Relatives	Daniel Massey (brother) Vincent Massey (uncle) Alice Massey (aunt)

Anna Raymond Massey (11 August 1937 – 3 July 2011)^[2][3] was an English actress.^[4] 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,^[5] a role that one of her co-stars, Julia McKenzie, has said "could have been written for her".^[6] Massey is also well known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972) as a barmaid who becomes involved with a suspected killer. She performed over one hundred character roles in British film and television. ^[7]

Early life

Massey was born in Thakeham, Sussex, England, the daughter of British actress Adrianne Allen and Canadian-born Hollywood actor Raymond Massey.^[8] 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.^[9]

Career

Although she had no formal training at either drama school or in repertory, Anna Massey made her first appearance on stage in May 1955 at the age of 17, at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, as Jane in The Reluctant Debutante, subsequently making her first London appearance in the same play at the Cambridge Theatre in May 1955 "and was suddenly famous".^[10] She then left the cast in London to repeat her performance in New York in October 1956.^[11] 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.^[10] She played a potential murder victim in Michael Powell's cult thriller Peeping Tom (1960) and appeared in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965). In 1972 she played the role of the barmaid Babs in Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film Frenzy. In the documentary on the film's DVD release, Massey mentioned that she originally auditioned for the much smaller role of the secretary Monica, a part for which Jean Marsh was cast. She also noted that her character's nude scenes in Frenzy were performed by body doubles. She appeared alongside her brother Daniel—they played siblings—in the horror film The Vault of Horror (1973).

Massey continued to make occasional film and stage appearances, but worked more frequently in television. She made her first small-screen appearance as Jacqueline in Green of the Year in October 1955,^[11] and thereafter featured in dramas such as The Pallisers (1974), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), the 1979 adaptation of Rebecca (in which she starred with her ex-husband Jeremy Brett), The Cherry Orchard (1980), and Anna Karenina (1985). She had roles in the British comedy series The Darling Buds of May (1991)^[12] 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.^[10]

In 1987, Massey was awarded the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her role in Hotel du Lac^[13] after acquiring the TV rights two years earlier, only a few weeks before the novel won the Booker Prize.^[6] She also appeared as Mrs D'Urberville in the 2008 BBC adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.^[9]

Acting style

One of Massey's assets as an actress was her "extraordinary voice... it was so listenable".^[6] Although Massey's parts were varied, her "cut-glass English accent conveyed a cold and repressed character on screen".^[14] 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.^[15] 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".^[6]

Personal life

In the New Year's Honours List published on 31 December 2004, she was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to drama.^[16]

Massey published an autobiography in 2006, Telling Some Tales, in which she revealed a difficult early life, including a distant relationship with her famous father and estrangement with her brother. She described her failed marriage (1958–1962) to actor 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.^[17][18] The couple had one son, writer and illustrator David Huggins (b. 1959).^[19] At an August 1988 dinner party held at the home of their mutual friend, Joy Whitby,^[8] she met Russian-born metallurgist Uri Andres, who had been based at Imperial College, London since 1975.^[20] The couple were married from November 1988 until her death in 2011.^[15]

Massey was quoted as saying, "Theatre eats up too much of your family life. I have a grandson and a husband and I'd rather I was able to be a granny and a wife."^[21]

She died from lung cancer in Kensington, London^[22] on 3 July 2011, aged 73.^[5][9]

Selected TV and filmography

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1958	Gideon's Day	Sally Gideon
1960	Peeping Tom	Helen Stephens
1963	The Trip to Biarritz	Marjorie Robertson
1965	Bunny Lake Is Missing	Elvira Smollett
1969	David Copperfield	Jane Murdstone
1969	De Sade	Renée de Montreuil
1970	The Looking Glass War	Avery's Wife
1970	Wicked Women	Christiana Edmunds	TV episode[23]
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	Lady Emily Balcombe	TV series, Episode: "Happy Families"
1992	Emily's Ghost	Miss Rabstock
1992	The Darling Buds of May	Mam’selle Antoinette Dupont, a French hotelier
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	Miss 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 – A healer
2001	Dark Blue World	English teacher
2002	The Importance of Being Earnest	Miss Prism
2002	Possession	Lady Bailey
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	Professor 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	Mrs. 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

• Massey, Anna (2006). Telling Some Tales. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-179645-8.

See also

• Massey family

References

1. "Anna Massey". The Film Programme. 17 August 2007. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
2. "Anna Massey dies at 73". The Guardian. 4 July 2011. Retrieved 4 July 2011.
3. The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Times, 18 December 2011, page 64
4. Maitland, Peter (23 November 1956). "Anna Massey Recalls Sudden Leap to Stardom on Stage". Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. p. 10. Retrieved 25 April 2011.
5. "Anna Massey, TV and Film Actress, Dies at 73". The New York Times. Associated Press. 6 July 2011.
6. Presented by John Wilson (8 July 2011). "BBC Radio 4, "Last Word"". Last Word. BBC. Radio 4.
7. *Anna Massey at IMDb
8. "Anna Massey: Obituaries". The Daily Telegraph. London. 5 July 2011. p. 27. Archived from the original on 12 July 2011. Retrieved 7 July 2011.
9. BBC News: "Actress Anna Massey dies at the age of 73"
10. "Anna Massey (Obituary)". The Times. London. 5 July 2011. p. 49.
11. Who's Who in the Theatre, 17th edition, Gale 1981 ISBN 0-8103-0235-7
12. Taylor, Alan F. (2002). Folkestone Past and Present. Somerset: Breedon Books. pp. 22–24. ISBN 1859832962.
13. "BAFTA Awards Search". awards.bafta.org. 2013. Retrieved 10 January 2014.
14. Bergen, Ronald (4 July 2011), "Anna Massey obituary", The Guardian
15. Billington, Michael (4 July 2011), "Anna Massey obituary", The Guardian
16. BBC NEWS: "Anna Massey collects CBE"
17. Massey, Anna (2006). Telling Some Tales. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-179645-8.
18. Davies, David Stuart (2006). Dancing in the Moonlight: Jeremy Brett. London: MDF The BiPolar Organisation.
19. David Huggins "At Christmas I dreaded playing charades", The Guardian, 17 November 2001
20. Sue Fox "How we met: Uri Andres and Anna Massey", The Independent, 7 March 1993
21. "Actress Anna Massey loses battle with cancer at 73". London Evening Standard (4 July 2011). Retrieved 4 June 2021.
22. "Massey, Anna Raymond (1937–2011)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/103953. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
23. Wicked Women at IMDb

External links

• Anna Massey at IMDb
• Anna Massey at the BFI's Screenonline
• Stage performances in Theatre Archive University of Bristol
• Obituary in The Independent
• Obituary in The Telegraph