(3 December 1933 - 19 December 2020)
The British actress Rosalind Knight, who has died aged 87, came from a theatrical family, her father being the actor Esmond Knight and her mother the comedienne Frances Clare. Her film debut was in Powell & Pressburger’s Gone to Earth (1950) and then she was a Lady-in-Waiting in Laurence Olivier’s Richard III. This was followed by Fortune Is a Woman with Jack Hawkins, Blue Murder at St Trinian’s and The Horse’s Mouth with Alec Guinness. By then she had already played Fanny Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby on television among other TV work. She acted in the theatre on and off during her career but mostly graduated to films and television. She continued in small film parts including a couple of Carry Ons, a Norman Wisdom comedy and one of the Doctor films. She was in the film of Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen, was Mrs Fitzpatrick in Tom Jones and did Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe... ? and Mr Quilp, both with Anthony Newley. Knight was often cast as grand, officious, crabby, hard-faced women in all sorts of TV series and films. She was in the 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes, played a Rada judge in the Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, and was in Mark Peploe’s Afraid of the Dark, Gary Sinyer’s Solitaire for 2, and Giovanni Veronesi’s Italian film Il mio West, a Western with David Bowie and Harvey Keitel. She was in About a Boy with Hugh Grant, played Pam in David Thewlis’s Cheeky, and an old nun in The Lady in the Van, her last film (in 2015). She was married to the producer-director Michael Elliott until his death in 1984. They have two daughters, the theatre director Marianne Elliott and the actress Susannah Elliott-Knight.
MICHAEL DARVELL
