In memoriam: Georgina Hale (Telegraph 15/01/24)

Georgina Hale, who has died aged 80, was a British stage and screen actress whose ready, slinky sensuality might have made her a star in other countries. Her diminutive, smoky-eyed presence and Betty Boop-like voice were most memorably deployed by Ken Russell in his run of 1970s provocations, notably The Devils (1971) and Mahler (1974), for which Hale won a BAFTA.

To the maelstrom of The Devils, Hale added a wounded tenderness as Philippe, the local girl who falls pregnant before being abandoned by Oliver Reed’s gallivanting Father Grandier, helping to kickstart both narrative calamity and the controversy the X-rated film generated upon first release. Thereafter, Hale was central to Russell’s arrestingly fleshy cinematic vision.

In The Boy Friend (1971), Russell’s mischievous rethink of Sandy Wilson’s backstage musical, Hale sang while writhing on a park bench in stockings. Mahler opened with Hale, as the composer’s wife Alma, cocooned naked on a rocky shore, while a later dream sequence had Robert Powell’s protagonist imagining his muse stripping for a Nazi lover.

Hale was phlegmatic about such nudity: “I don’t mind having to take my clothes off. It’s a slice of life, after all. But I don’t really enjoy it.” Nevertheless, her full-bodied commitment helped secure the BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer at the 1975 awards, beating Blazing Saddles’ Cleavon Little and Badlands’ Sissy Spacek.

Further collaborations included Lisztomania (1975), Valentino (1977) and a gender-flipped TV version of Treasure Island (1995); Russell described Hale as “an actress of such sensitivity she can make the hair rise on your arms”. Yet her performance as Alma Mahler now seems to intuit what was to come: playing second fiddle to better known men.

She was born Georgina Hole [sic] on August 4, 1943 to Ilford landlord George Hole and his wife Elsie (née Fordham). It was an itinerant childhood, her education disrupted by the family’s relocation from pub to pub: “I couldn’t write, spell or read. There was a real shame in it, and you were the dunce of the class, always getting whacked around the head.”

She was training as a hairdresser in Knightsbridge when a friend passed her tickets for a production of West Side Story. Inspired, she signed up at the new Chelsea Actors’ Workshop behind Harrods, studying four nights a week: “Someone came down and said, ‘Can you read a script?’ I thought, God, I can hardly read, and I certainly didn’t know what a script was.”

Having tweaked her name, Hale successfully auditioned for RADA (“I just learnt the shortest bit of Juliet from a book of speeches and stood there like a petrified beetroot”), graduating in 1965. She made her RSC debut that year in The Comedy of Errors; by 1967, she was playing Juliet at the Liverpool Playhouse. Her West End debut came with a 1976 production of The Seagull, alongside Alan Bates.

Beyond her work with Russell, Hale worked steadily – doing episodes of Budgie (1971-72, as Adam Faith’s wife), Upstairs Downstairs (1975) and Minder (1980) – without improving her onscreen status. She was the typist fending off Keith Barron in Dennis Potter’s Play for Today entry Only Make Believe (1973); she was a salty switchboard girl in the TV spin-off Sweeney 2 (1978); she made breakfast for Roger Daltrey’s eponymous career criminal in McVicar (1980), clad only in an apron.

She enjoyed a notable stage hit in 1981 with Nell Dunn’s sauna-set Steaming, earning an Olivier Award nomination, only to see her role recast for the 1985 film adaptation. She returned to the boards in 1982 to play Mussolini’s mistress Clara Petacci – alongside Glenda Jackson’s Eva Braun – in Robert David MacDonald’s Summit Conference; and worked with Jackson again on a 1984 production of Phaedra.

More prominent screen work followed. In “The Happiness Patrol”, a Doctor Who three-parter of 1988, Hale’s Daisy K repainted the TARDIS as pink as her wig. She gained a younger fanbase upon replacing Elizabeth Estensen as the witchy lead in the CITV series T-Bag; while “Love and Death”, a seaside-set 1990 episode of One Foot in the Grave, reunited Hale with her RADA classmate Richard Wilson.

Wilson-level celebrity eluded Hale, however; she spent two years washing dishes to make ends meet. Entering middle age unabashed, she signed up for sex comedy Preaching to the Perverted (1997) and went topless as a Lithuanian princess in Brit indie AKA (2002); she returned to TV with episodes of Casualty (2000), The Bill (2002) and crime drama The Commander (2007), where critic Nancy Banks-Smith noted Hale “was able to do wonders with a mere sliver of a scene”.

In later life, she guested on Emmerdale (2006) and teen soap Hollyoaks (2011-12); she also teamed up with Richard Briers as veterans battling the undead in the lively B-movie Cockneys vs. Zombies (2012). Her final role came with a 2016 episode of Holby City.

In 2010, Hale was listed as one of the ten greatest British character actors by The Guardian, recognition for a career that mostly unspooled far from the limelight: “Once I reached 51, my life drastically changed. The parts aren’t there, the people you’ve worked for have retired or died… I tried to change my agent, and eleven agents turned me down. One told me they didn’t take actresses over 45 because it was too depressing to talk to them on the telephone. You felt as though you’d never been an actor. I had periods where I wondered if I’d actually done all these things, or whether it was somebody else.”

She married once, to the actor John Forgeham; they were divorced in 1969.

Georgina Hale, born August 4, 1943, died January 4, 2024.