JANE LAPOTAIRE
(26 December 1944 – 5 March 2026)
Jane Lapotaire, who has died at the age of 81, leaves behind an immense body of work. Beginning with the theatre, she worked for the Bristol Old Vic and was a member of both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She played the West End, The Young Vic and toured with the Compass company and was a success on Broadway, too, with Pam Gems’ biographical musical play Piaf. Her television roles were extremely extensive and she also found a niche appearing in a long line of radio productions. And, to cap it all, she made over a dozen films, from Crescendo, a horror film in 1970, to Smyrna (2021), about the Turkish atrocities towards the Greeks.
Jane Elizabeth Marie Lapotaire (née Burgess) was born in Ipswich in Suffolk to a French mother, Louise Burgess, who was herself fostered in Ipswich. She was 19 when Jane was born and she never revealed who Jane’s father was. Jane was also fostered by her mother’s foster mother but had a poor upbringing. Her life improved for her at Northgate Grammar School where she discovered art, music and literature. When she was twelve her real mother tried to take her back, but Jane chose to stay with her foster mother. Later on, she accepted her birth mother’s married name of Lapotaire.
Jane began studying for the stage at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 1961, having failed to get into Rada. She joined the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company in 1965 with her stage debut in J.B. Priestley’s When We Are Married playing the maid, Ruby Birtle.
In 1979 she starred as the French singer Édith Piaf in Piaf, in different London venues and then on Broadway. It was an astonishing performance that won Lapotaire both an Olivier and a Tony.
For the cinema, Jane Lapotaire had an equally wide range of roles. In 1972 Charlton Heston directed her in Antony and Cleopatra in which she played Charmian. The Asphyx (1972) was a well-reviewed British horror film about a soul-snatching demon in Victorian times with Robert Stephens and Robert Powell. Something completely different was Walt Disney’s One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, a jolly romp with Peter Ustinov, after which Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka was something else again with a screenplay by Paul Mayersberg about a gold prospector who becomes the world’s wealthiest man. Lapotaire played his bored, alcoholic wife. She was also in To Catch a King, a thriller with Robert Wagner, Lady Jane, from a script by David Edgar about Lady Jane Grey, the nine-days Queen in which she played Queen Mary. She was Olga, one of the women in Pablo Picasso’s life in the Merchant-Ivory production Surviving Picasso with Anthony Hopkins in the title role.
Shooting Fish (1997) was a British romcom in which she played a headmistress, while There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble was a British sports comedy with Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone. Ann Rice’s book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt became The Young Messiah on film, a Biblical drama with Lapotaire as Sarah in a story about Satan and resurrection. In the remake of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca (originally filmed by Hitchcock in 1940), Lapotaire was Granny in a cast including Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas. Lapotaire’s last film was Smyrna, My Beloved with Mimi Denissi, Susan Hampshire and Rupert Graves, a memorably shocking drama about the massacre of the Greeks in 1922.
Jane Lapotaire also appeared in many television series, including Sherlock Holmes in 1968 (with Peter Cushing in the title role), Jason King, Callan, Crown Court, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Casualty, Downton Abbey and The Crown. There was a time when Lapotaire was unable to function properly. In 2000 she was preparing for a course on Shakespeare at the Ecole Internationale in Paris when she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage which required her to have a six-hour operation and she was unconscious for three weeks. When she recovered, she wrote a memoir, Time Out of Mind, one of several books she published.
Jane Lapotaire was first married to the actor and cameraman Oliver Wood, from 1965 to 1967. She was then married to the director Roland Joffé from 1971 to 1980 and they had a son, the screenwriter and director Rowan Joffé. After they divorced Jane was the partner of the actor Michael Pennington. It is sad to see the passing of such a great talent who made an enormous impression in all media. Jane Lapotaire was a one-off, a real working actress who would take on any role she fancied. They really don’t make them like Jane Lapotaire anymore.
MICHAEL DARVELL