Born: March 21st, 1957
Died: October 20th, 2023
Although her first renown on television was in tough-talking professional roles — the fierce and cynical news editor in the first two series of Drop the Dead Donkey (1990-91); no-nonsense doctors in Peak Practice (1999) and Dalziel and Pascoe (2005); and as Supt Susan Blake in the first series of Merseybeat (2001-02) — there seemed to be no limit to the talent of Haydn Gwynne, who has died aged 66.
The impression that she could be drop-dead funny, as she was in Drop the Dead Donkey, was consolidated by more recent royal family forays in Channel 4′s The Windsors (2016) in which, not to be outdone by Harry Enfield’s crude impersonation of Prince Charles, she played Camilla as Cruella de Vil — or “as if she were Joan Collins in a soap called Balmoral”, she said. More sedately, she applied a twinkling composure to Lady Susan Hussey, woman of the royal bed-chamber, in the fifth series (2022) of The Crown on Netflix.
Gwynne had been a notable musical theatre presence on stage since 1988. So it was no great surprise that she stormed the stage as the dancing teacher Mrs Wilkinson in Stephen Daldry’s outstanding 2005 musical transformation of his own movie, Billy Elliot, written by Lee Hall with a new score by Elton John. She layered her performance with a teacher’s melancholy and a surrogate mother’s relief as Billy came truly alive on stage, and she went with the show to Broadway where she won a couple of major awards and a Tony nomination.
Gwynne was a late developer as an actor, although she had dabbled in amateur dramatics while at school in Sussex. The daughter of Rosamond (nee Dobson) and Guy Hayden-Gwynne, she was born into a large family in Hurstpierpoint, where her father ran a printing business. She had been on the verge of a career as a tennis player, having represented Sussex at junior county level, but from Burgess Hill girls’ school went instead to Nottingham University, then took off for five years on a university lectureship in Rome, teaching English as a foreign language.
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Realising at last that she was in denial of her germane acting bug, Gwynne returned to Britain, where she quickly built a reputation as a star of the stage.
All good new playwrights must be buoyed by good actors, lest they sink, and Shelagh Stephenson’s debut play The Memory of Water (1996) was a case in point at the Hampstead Theatre. That play is continuously revived.
Gwynne’s first starring role on TV was in 1989 as the feminist, lecherous lecturer Robyn Penrose in David Lodge’s adaptation of his own signature novel Nice Work. She remained in demand over the subsequent 30 years, with telling cameos as, for instance, Caesar’s wife Calpurnia in the international sandals-and-toga epic co-production of Rome (2005-07).
Her work remained varied and always surprising. Her last West End appearance was in The Great British Bake Off Musical in March at the Noël Coward where, as Pam Lee, she approximated to an idea of Prue Leith — with cartwheels. As the critic Dominic Cavendish said: “Sometimes [in the theatre] you need Eugene O’Neill. Sometimes you just need a cake trolley.”
Gwynne was recently separated from her partner, Jason Phipps, a Jungian psychoanalyst, though they remained friends, and she is survived by him, their two sons, Orlando and Harrison, and her sister Pippa and brother Nick.
