Obituary: Anna Massey, actress

Anna Massey, actress. Born: 11 August, 1937, in Sussex. Died: 3 July, 2011, aged 73.

Anna Massey was never one of cinema's great beauties, but in an acting career spanning more than half a century she worked with some of cinema and television's greatest directors and writers and she proved herself in everything from Dickens to the most controversial sex drama of the day.

In one of her first films, Peeping Tom, she played the sweet-natured young woman who innocently befriends a perverted killer. The film is now regarded as a masterpiece, but it horrified even hardened critics back in 1960, and the reaction prompted director Michael Powell to give up making films in Britain and flee to Australia.

Massey also worked with Alfred Hitchcock, playing a cockney barmaid who is murdered in Frenzy, one of the great director's later films, made on location in England.

She admitted she did not have the face for film stardom and recently compared herself to a prune. She also suffered from depression, eating disorders and stage and camera fright, which was sometimes reflected in the fragility of her characters.

She came to specialise in quiet, repressed women, often from another era, beginning with the role of Jane Murdstone in a starry 1969 adaptation of David Copperfield that featured Laurence Olivier, Richard Attenborough and Ralph Richardson.

Over the years Massey progressed from spinster sister to unmarried aunt and occasionally lonely widow, working her way through Hardy and Austen, Chekov and Tolstoy, The Pallisers and The Darling Buds of May. She was made a CBE in 2005.

Recently she returned to Dickens and Hardy, playing Mrs D'Urberville in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, with Gemma Arterton, and Mrs Bedwin in Oliver Twist. She also played Mrs Thatcher, in the drama Pinochet in Suburbia in 2006.

Massey was born in England, but came from a distinguished Canadian family on her father's side. Her uncle Vincent Massey was later Governor General. Her father was Raymond Massey, who played Dr Gillespie to Richard Chamberlain's heartthrob Dr Kildare in the hit American TV series in the 1960s.

Raymond Massey was rather egocentric and insisted his daughter be called after him, so she was Anna Raymond Massey. Her mother was the English stage actress and society hostess Adrianne Allen, her brother Daniel was an actor and John Ford was her godfather.

Her father walked out on the family and returned to North America when Anna was very young. Her mother was emotionally distant and Massey revealed in her autobiography Telling Some Tales that she relied on her nanny for warmth and affection.

In her teens she was starring in the London West End and on Broadway in the comedy The Reluctant Debutante by William Douglas Home, the Scottish playwright and brother of the Conservative politician.Michael Powell recalled in his memoirs: "Anna had brought theatrical London to its feet, and to her feet… Anna Massey had dark red hair and large, expressive eyes."

In 1958 she made her film debut as Jack Hawkins's daughter in Gideon's Day, John Ford's adaptation of the John Creasey novel, and she appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in a production of TS Eliot's verse play The Elder Statesman.

It was a momentous year for Massey, for she also got married to the actor Jeremy Brett. She was a virgin, he was homosexual, and the marriage was short-lived, though it did, somehow, produce a son. Despite her privileged start in life and early success, her life was an emotional roller-coaster and she needed therapy to help her through it.

The violent controversy around Peeping Tom could hardly have helped her nerves. While Powell took himself off to the other side of the world, Massey stayed in England and played Titania in an ITV production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the wife of the young Anthony Hopkins in the Le Carr adaptation The Looking Glass War.

The 1973 film The Vault of Horror gave her a rare chance to act with her brother Daniel. He goes to visit her and then murders her to get the family inheritance, only to discover that she is a vampire and so are all her neighbours.

She co-starred with Alan Bates in the Dennis Potter adaptation of Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge in 1978, and she was the sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers in a 1979 TV version of Rebecca, with her ex-husband Jeremy Brett as Maxim de Winter.

She appeared in The Importance of Being Earnest in a National Theatre production which came to the Theatre Royal in Glasgow in 1983, and then almost 20 years later in the feature film version with Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon.

Throughout her career Massey managed a mix of theatre, film and television, though the balance latterly tilted towards television, particularly literary adaptations and crime dramas - she was a guest star in various popular crime series, including Inspector Morse.

She won a Bafta award in 1987 for her performance as a romantic novelist, who had made rather a mess of her own romances, in the TV drama Hotel du Lac.

In real life, however, Massey did find love and happiness again. In 1988 she met Uri Andres, a Russian scientist, at a dinner party and they married a few months later.

Her other credits include Aunt Norris in Mansfield Park; Queen Victoria in the TV mini-series Around the World in 80 Days; A Tale of Two Cities; a guest appearance in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles; Lady Bailey in the film of AS Byatt's Possession, with Gwyneth Paltrow; and the sitcom The Robinsons, with Martin Freeman.

She is survived by her second husband and her son from her first marriage, David Huggins, who is a novelist.