R.I.P. Sheila Allen

[Reza]

Sheila Allen obituary

Actor who excelled at playing women of strength, wit and charm

Michael Billington guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 20 October 2011 09.49 EDT

Sheila Allen, who has died aged 78, was an actor
of extraordinary range and power, and a
delightful, independent-minded woman. From 1966
to 1978, she was a stalwart of the Royal
Shakespeare Company. Her Stratford-upon-Avon
career reached a triumphant climax when she
played the eponymous heroine of Pam
Gems's Queen Christina. While there were many
great roles that one would have loved to see her
play such as Shakespeare's Cleopatra and
Ibsen's Hedda Gabler she was an invaluable
team-player who always made her individual mark.

Sheila was born in Chard, Somerset. After
attending Howell's school, in Denbigh, Clwyd, she
trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from
1949 to 1951. Repertory seasons followed, first
in Yeovil and Pitlochry and then for the Arena
theatre company in Birmingham, where her roles
included Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew and
Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. From
Birmingham she moved to Bristol Old Vic which, in
the late 1950s, was the most prestigious of rep
companies. There she played in Shakespeare, Shaw
and once-fashionable contemporary plays such as
Peter Ustinov's Romanoff and Juliet.

It was in London in January 1962 that Sheila
caught the all-important eye of the Observer's
drama critic, Kenneth Tynan. Reviewing the
whimsically titled On a Clear Day You Can See
Canterbury, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East,
Tynan described her as "a new actress of
explosive charm and authority with a tough,
pouting presence that banishes cuteness and even
encourages awe". Writing about her again, four
months later, in James Brabazon's The Last Ally
at the Lyric Hammersmith, Tynan became even more
fervent, hailing "a troubled, big-boned,
life-illuminating creature called Sheila Allen"
and adding: "I am tempted to place her on the
shortlist of postwar actresses to whom I might
one day append the adjective great."

Even if greatness may have eluded her, Sheila was
always brilliant at playing women of strength,
wit and charm. Her marriage, in 1964, to the
stage and TV director David Jones, guided her
career towards the RSC, where Jones became an
artistic associate. She appeared, under his
direction, in David Mercer's Belcher's Luck
(1966), earning great praise for her portrayal of
the haughty, English upper-class Helen Rawston.
At Stratford, she had a voice and a presence that
could command the intimidating main theatre but
could also be modulated to suit the demands of the intimate Other Place.

Sheila twice played Goneril in Stratford King
Lears: for Trevor Nunn in 1968 and for Buzz Goodbody in 1974.
I also recall her as a memorable Constance in John
Barton's 1974 version of King John, where she
turned a woman who often seems a Niagara of
self-pity into an awesome icon of grief. But it
was Gems's Queen Christina, first seen at the
Other Place in 1977, that gave her the role of a
lifetime and enabled her to inspire comparisons
to Garbo in her ability to capture the
cross-dressing monarch's sexual ambivalence and
inner contest between desire and duty.

As if to escape the clutches of institutional
theatre, and to assert her feminist independence,
Sheila often appeared in the emergent London
fringe of the late 1960s. I have a vivid memory
of her as a whip-brandishing dominatrix in a show
called Vagina Rex at the old Arts Lab in Drury Lane in 1969.

The pattern of her career was partly determined
by her husband's movements. When was invited to
form a permanent rep company at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music in
1980, she became a pivotal member of the team.
She was particularly fine as Paulina in a
Brooklyn production of The Winter's Tale,
savagely clawing Leontes's attendants and at one
point staging a sitdown protest in his bedroom.
She returned, with Jones, to London to appear in
1987 at Hampstead theatre in Richard Nelson's
Between East and West where she appeared,
opposite John Woodvine, as a Czech exile viewing
American life with an enthralling mixture of pride and prejudice.

Sheila acted periodically in films and on
television, most notably in The Prisoner in 1967
and as Cassie Manson in Bouquet of Barbed Wire
(1976). In the latter, the intensity of the
relationship between her possessive husband
(Frank Finlay) and manipulative daughter (Susan
Penhaligon) came to be mirrored in her
involvement with her son-in-law James
Aubrey). The following year saw a sequel, Another
Bouquet. But she was, essentially, a stage animal
and, when not acting, showed herself to be a born teacher.

She taught at the Lee Strasberg institute in New
York and, more recently, at the Guildford School
of Acting. To my astonishment, she turned up a
few years ago in a text-and-performance degree
class at King's College London, where I was
lecturing. I should not have been surprised:
Sheila was not only a superb actor but also a
passionate, intellectually voracious woman always driven by a hunger to learn.

She is survived by her sons, Joe and Jesse.
David, from whom she was divorced, died in 2008.
A sister, Joan, also predeceased her.

Sheila Allen, actor, born 22 October 1932; died 13 October 2011