Rachel Gurney

Rachel Gurney Lubbock, actress: born Eton, Buckinghamshire 5 March 1920; married 1945 Denys Rhodes (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1950); died Holt, Norfolk 24 November 2001.

Rachel Gurney Lubbock, actress: born Eton, Buckinghamshire 5 March 1920; married 1945 Denys Rhodes (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1950); died Holt, Norfolk 24 November 2001.

One of the most elegant actresses of her generation – tall and slim, with an always stylish physical presence on stage – Rachel Gurney inevitably spent much of her career in period costume.

On stage her qualities were much in demand in plays by Shaw, Barrie, Wilde, Granville-Barker and Priestley. Happily, in later years she scored striking successes in contemporary plays (by authors including Ronald Harwood and Hugh Whitemore). On television her many appearances in modern material were eclipsed by the world-wide success of Upstairs, Downstairs in the 1970s, in which she played the Edwardian-era Eaton Square matriarch Mrs (later Lady) Bellamy.

Gurney came from a conventional middle-class background; she was Buckinghamshire-born and educated at the Challoner School in London. After a brief spell with the Birmingham Repertory Company, then one of the most prestigious regional theatres, under Sir Barry Jackson, she made an early West End mark in a sympathetic role (she always brought something special to tolerant, understanding characters) in Warren Chetham-Strute's play of tensions in a boys' public school, The Guinea-Pig (Criterion, 1946), a long-running success.

Remarkably quickly she became established as a rising younger talent – as Lady Katherine in a strong revival of The Sleepy Clergyman (Criterion, 1947) and in two impressive appearances at the Arts Theatre, at a high point of its fortunes under Alec Clunes's adventurous management, in a Shavian triple-bill (1951) and as Alice in a powerful production of Granville-Barker's The Voysey Inheritance (1952).

Keen to widen her experience and range, she also worked at the Bristol Old Vic during an annus mirabilis under Hugh Hunt when she appeared in a new play (later a recast near-miss in London), Peter Watling's Rain on the Just (1948), about an aristocratic family attempting to prevent the sale of the ancestral seat. Gurney won widespread praise for her effectively quiet underplaying as the fiancée of the family's selfishly cynical elder son.

She had less luck with another new play – Lewis Grant Wallace's First Person Singular (Duke of York's, 1952), a convoluted affair centred on an eminent old novelist and a resentful younger writer. Irene Handl, in a peripheral role as a scatty schoolteacher, stole what play was there, whilst Gurney did what she could to enliven the fully written role of the famous writer's daughter. Another solid West End hit – Carrington, VC (Westminster, 1953) – again barely stretched her in the role of the eponymous hero's wife, calling for little more than a serene stage presence.

A smaller role, Olivia in Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden (Haymarket, 1956), was much more rewarding. This sui generis high comedy, a feast of firecracking language and unrepented barbs, had a cast led by Edith Evans as the capriciously imperious dowager Mrs St Maugham and Peggy Ashcroft as the enigmatic governess Miss Madrigal. As director, John Gielgud knew that he must have a strong actress as Mrs St Maugham's remarried daughter, returning to reclaim her own troubled daughter who has been in her grandmother's care. Gurney's contribution was strongly effective and much valued by both the leads. She played in it for nearly two years.

A frivol of old-style Shaftesbury Avenue country-house comedy of potential adultery, the long-running The Grass is Greener (St Martin's, 1959) by Hugh and Margaret Williams, used Gurney's comedic gifts to good advantage and she also managed to create a flesh-and-blood character out of Lady Chiltern in a starry revival of Wilde's An Ideal Husband (Piccadilly, 1966). She much enjoyed her time at the Palladium, playing a Mrs Darling of warmth and touching maternal solicitude in Peter Pan (1975).

Two of her most notable later stage appearances brought her particular success on Broadway, Ronald Harwood's The Dresser (Brooks Atkinson, New York, 1981) starred Paul Rogers as "Sir", the Wolfit-like actor giving a wartime King Lear and Tom Courtenay as his Fool-like dresser. Gurney played "Lady", treated with scant respect by her Lear/husband (inevitably reminiscent of the real-life Wolfit reputedly announcing at one curtain-call that at the next performance his wife would play Cordelia and replying to a heckler shouting "Your wife's an old bag!" with "Nevertheless, tomorrow night she will play Cordelia"). The role was underwritten, but Gurney charged it with an endearingly comic sense of long-suffering, exasperated devotion.

Even better was her performance opposite Derek Jacobi in Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code (Neil Simon, New York, 1987) in which Gurney played the mother of Alan Turing, the code-breaking genius destroyed by a hypocritical establishment for his homosexuality. Gurney played this tricky role with a potent fusion of vivacity and emotional distance.

On television Gurney played in a wide range of productions, including many classic serials (Portrait of a Lady – she was a natural Jamesian – and an early dramatisation of Trollope's The Way We Live Now among them).

But she will always be associated primarily with the Bellamy family of Upstairs, Downstairs, that cunning variation (conceived by Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh) on the Marryot household of Coward's Cavalcade. Surviving everything from potential scandal and impending financial ruin to more domestic crisis such as a truculent Mrs Bridges or a wailing Ruby below stairs, Gurney as Marjorie Bellamy revealed the quintessential iron fist in a velvet glove, inspiring undying devotion from husband and butler alike. She managed to suggest an inner life to the character – especially in her scenes with Gordon Jackson's Hudson – that avoided cliché even in some weaker later scripts.

Gurney had an equally distinguished radio career, including a remarkable stint as a member of the BBC Radio Repertory Company (when that institution was, rightly, properly valued by the corporation) in which she played in everything from Shakespeare (she should have played more classics – her Volumnia in Coriolanus would have been redoubtable) to Agatha Christie.

Alan Strachan