by When she was offered the role of matriarchal Irene Raymond in EastEnders, Roberta Taylor told producers she didn’t care what the character looked like as long as she didn’t have to wear a cardigan.
After three years (1997-2000) of melodramatic plot lines – Irene was an ex-wife and estranged mother with a toyboy lover, a grocery store and a penchant for new age fads (including Feng Shui and aromatherapy) – she promptly jumped the good BBC ship for another tough role in The Bill (2002-08) on ITV, as the hard-drinking and no-nonsense Inspector Gina Gold.
Taylor, who has died aged 76, won these powerful roles with an illustrious theater career, praising her craft and her unique blend of glamor and vulgarity over a long association – 1976 to 1995 – with the Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow, and seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Exchange in Manchester, the Birmingham Rep and in the West End.
Her last major TV series was the cozy private investigator comedy Shakespeare & Hathaway (2018-22), with Jo Joyner as Luella Shakespeare and Mark Benton as Colombo-style sycophant Frank Hathaway, and Taylor as the theater outfit who was very fit and vocal. , Gloria Fonteyn.
The series was mostly shot in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Taylor managed to make a real parish in his solemn dedication of a dead dog’s ashes to the River Avon just below the stalls bar terrace of Shakespeare’s Royal Theatre.
Taylor’s last stage show was the Jonathan Harvey musical jukebox Dusty (2018), which closed after a short tour despite a promising dramatic foundation and strong performances by Katherine Kingsley as Dusty Springfield and Taylor as her very breathless mother (“sly and subtle” said Susannah Clapp in the Observer).
By this time, looking at household name status, audiences and theater goers were familiar with Taylor’s cutting edge brand of emotional authenticity, warm and expressive voice and those big liquid brown eyes, set against handsome, square. She triumphantly demonstrated how a truly good actor can effortlessly encompass great tragedy, high comedy and top-notch soap operas.
And she had the advantage of being an authentic Cockney whose stage work, as much as her high-profile TV career, was rooted in family life and the characters she described so vividly in her well-written memoir , Too Many Mothers (2005). ).
Roberta, generally known as “Robbie”, was born in Plaistow, east London, to Winifred Roberts, a clippy on the old trolley buses, and another bus driver, Robert Archer, who was married elsewhere and did not stick with him. She grew up in a small house on the Isle of Dogs with her mother, grandmother and various aunts.
But these women in her life, she always maintained, made her the woman she was. She attended the nearby church primary school, St Luke’s, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert secondary school, leaving without qualifications to take a series of secretarial jobs. While training to be a dental nurse, she taught drama classes at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel.
By this time she was married (in 1966) to Victor Taylor, a rope maker, with whom she had a son, Elliott, born the same year. An elderly friend in the Portobello market suggested she try drama school. She did so, successfully, in the Central school, in 1973, on the same day that Peter Guinness, who could be another actor, and her future life partner and second husband, auditioned.
Taylor had set her heart on working with the Citizens, establishing itself at the time, under the directorship of Giles Havergal, designer Philip Prowse and translator/playwright Robert David MacDonald, as the leading theater company. exciting and most internationally minded in Britain.
She began her degree in 1976, appearing for the first time that year in a repertoire of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins (their last collaboration) and a glorious version of Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade, the first ever in English.
Other notable performances included La Duchesse de Guermantes in A Waste of Time (1981), an extraordinary four-hour compression of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; and high comedy performances in Private Lives (1984) by Noël Coward, in which Taylor was very funny as Amanda, with a refined sense of vulnerability, unlike what I imagine Gertrude Lawrence to be in the original production, and in Oscar Wilde’s The Ideal . Husband (1986). Taylor was very funny, as he told the blackmail Mrs. Cheveley who finds an incriminating bracelet caught on his wrist, a four-letter expletion and, when she tried to stuff a letter down her dress, she revealed her naked breast.
In 1990, she starred in Glenda Jackson’s Citizens revival of Brecht’s Mother Courage, also seen at the (unusual) newly renovated Mermaid theater in Puddle Dock, London. As Yvette, Taylor complemented Jackson’s stunning lead performance, strutting among the army in red, lace-up platform boots.
Much later, in 2014, she returned to The Citizens in Dominic Hill’s revival of Hamlet, playing Gertrude to Claudius Guinness. One night, when an angry Claudius exits stage left following an order, she unexpectedly turns on her heel and exits stage right, winning huge laughter and redefining the wedge of discontent at drive down their relationship on stage.
Her films were few, but they included significant vignettes in The Witches (1990 with Nicolas Roeg), with Anjelica Huston and Mai Zetterling; and Brian Gilbert’s Tom and Viv (1994).
A dedicated smoker, Taylor suffered from emphysema, and a fall two months ago compounded her ill health with pneumonia, an infection she could not overcome. She divorced her first husband in 1975 and set up home in Pimlico, central London, and then Vauxhall, with Guinness, 20 years ago. They got married in 1996.
She is survived by Elliott, a granddaughter, Ellis, and two stepbrothers, Brian and Lionel.
• Roberta Alexandra Mary Taylor, actress, born 26 February 1948; died 6 July 2024
