R.I.P. Daphne Slater

[Reza]

Daphne Slater obituary

by Michael Coveney, guardian.co.uk,

Wednesday 17 October 2012 09.09 EDT


As a captivating young ingenue in Shakespeare on
stage, and Jane Austen on television, Daphne
Slater, who has died aged 84, enjoyed a brilliant
career for 10 years, followed by decent
television work for the next 10, before
withdrawing into family life almost completely by 1975.

At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1947, she appeared as a
radical (for those days) young Olivia in Twelfth
Night; both mother and daughter (Thaisa and
Marina) in Pericles; Juliet in Peter Brook's
beautiful Romeo and Juliet set in Verona ("a
miracle of masks, mists and sudden grotesquerie,"
wrote Kenneth Tynan); and Miranda in The Tempest.
Her Juliet, said Tynan, was rightly "excitable
and impetuous, and she communicates this
convulsive ardour until it becomes our panic as
well as hers". Her future husband, John Harrison,
played Benvolio, and their offstage romance
continued during The Tempest, in which Harrison
played Ferdinand, chopping up logs and promising,
no doubt, a "brave new world".

But she was never powered by professional
ambition, and, when Harrison was appointed
director of the old Nottingham Playhouse in 1952,
Slater departed the West End
stage without great regret and refocused her
career alongside her husband. She took television
work when it suited her and concentrated on
raising her two boys, becoming what is known in
the business as a "term-time" actor. When she and
Harrison divorced in 1964, she concentrated on
television work, before marrying an Austrian
businessman, Frederick Kolmar, and retiring
completely in 1975, living thereafter in Germany and Switzerland.

She was small, blonde and beautiful, but not
conventionally so ("Daphne Slater gives her wan
little apple face a happy outing," said the
admiring Tynan after her performance in Moliere),
with a light, quick voice and a particular love
of good books and conversation. She regretted
never having gone to university and was never
happier, says Harrison, than after a first night,
seated round a dinner table with the likes of the
playwright Christopher Fry, Hugh Willatt of the
Arts Council, or Michael Barry, her favourite BBC television producer.

Her parents were solid lower-middle class, living
in Bedford Park, west London. Her father commuted
to an office job in the City. Her mother, "a
thwarted actress", according to Harrison,
propelled Slater from Haberdashers' Aske's school
to Rada on a state scholarship. She won the gold
medal and, while a student, appeared in a BBC
documentary I Want to Be an Actor (1946)
alongside the drama adjudicator Irene Vanbrugh.

Slater was spotted by the film director Herbert
Wilcox, who gave her a seven-year contract and a
leading role in The Courtneys of Curzon Street
(1947), a family saga set across three wars and
four generations, starring Anna Neagle and
Michael Wilding, with support from Coral Browne, Thora Hird and Michael Medwin.

The great success of the 1947 Stratford season
exerted a pull away from the film studios, and
Slater embarked on a series of classical roles at
the Arts theatre in London, under the artistic
direction of Alec Clunes. She appeared there in
the first production of Fry's The Lady's Not for
Burning, directed by Jack Hawkins, as well as in
Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Moliere's Tartuffe.

The Moliere performance noted by Tynan was in The
Gay Invalid (Le Malade Imaginaire) at the Garrick
theatre, with an extraordinary cast including
Elisabeth Bergner, AE Matthews and Peter Cushing.
In 1952, Cushing also played Mr Darcy to Slater's
Elizabeth Bennet in the first BBC TV version of
Pride and Prejudice, the same year as she
appeared in an Old Vic King Lear as Cordelia.

Slater had already made her mark in Jane Austen
as Harriet Smith in a 1947 television version of
Emma, and she completed a BBC Austen hat-trick in
1960, when she played Anne Elliot in Persuasion.
All of these performances have been superseded by
subsequent film versions, but this was a rich
period of British acting coming to terms with a
comparatively new medium. She scored another
great success as Jane Eyre, in 1956, with Stanley
Baker playing opposite as Mr Rochester.

Slater's last major BBC TV role, in 1957, was as
Prue Sarn, the girl with a cleft lip, in a
six-part series based on Mary Webb's Precious
Bane. The moral and Miltonic story of country
life in Shropshire after the Napoleonic wars also
starred Patrick Troughton (the second Doctor Who) and Paul Daneman.

At Nottingham, where Tynan indefatigably referred
to Slater as "on her day, the best ingenue in the
country", she played luminous versions of
Rosalind and Viola in Shakespeare, as well as
anything else going in Ibsen or Chekhov. There
was a glimpse of her charm and quality in the
small role of Portia in a 1959 BBC TV Julius
Caesar, with Eric Porter as Brutus and Michael Gough as Cassius.

The rest is not silence, exactly, but the odd
sighting throughout the 1960s in Jackanory, The
Man in the Iron Mask, Callan, Our Man at St
Mark's (with Donald Sinden) then as the Old
Queen Mary in Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R
(1971), in ITV's Sunday Night Theatre (1969-73)
and finally in the series Shadows (1975).

Slater was predeceased by her brother and second
husband. She is survived by Harrison, who
remained a close friend, and their two sons, Stephen and William.

Daphne Helen Slater, actor, born 3 March 1928; died 4 October 2012