R.I.P. Marigold Sharman

[Reza]

thestage.co.uk



Marigold Sharman

Published Friday 8 June 2012 at 17:06 by Richard Anthony Baker

An international tour with Vivien Leigh was probably the high point
of the career of actress Marigold Sharman. But she scaled down her
theatre work in unusual circumstances. She believed she had seen the
ghost of her father approaching her down an aisle in the stalls of a
theatre. It was a sign, she maintained, that she had to give up.
Sharman studied at the Webber Douglas School, now the Central School
of Speech and Drama, where, as she put it, she learned "how to point
a toe and wave gracefully, but not a lot more".

Her first theatre job was on the Palace Pier, Brighton, followed by
six years in rep, finishing in Birmingham, where she appeared in,
among other plays, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Sheridan's The
School for Scandal and Henry IV, Part 1.

While in Birmingham, she fell in love with her future husband, Mark
Kingston, best known for creating the role of the world-weary
university lecturer in Willy Russell's Educating Rita. She then
joined a national tour of Salad Days (1960-61), Julian Slade's
musical about a group of college graduates and their adventures with
a magic piano.

Both Kingston and Sharman then embarked on Vivien Leigh's tour, in
which they appeared in Twelfth Night, La Dame aux Camelias, an
adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' novel, and the Christopher Fry play,
Duel of Angels. During the tour, on an island in the Great Barrier
Reef, off the coast of Queensland, the couple married and travelled
on with Leigh to New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines,
Thailand, India and Brazil.

On television, Sharman regularly appeared in Dr Finlay's Casebook
(1967-70), the BBC series about a Scottish doctors' practice, set in
the 1920s, and in two long-forgotten soaps, United! which focused on
a football team, and Compact, about publishing a magazine.

It was while appearing in Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment
with Donald Sutherland and Nigel Hawthorne in Bromley that she looked
into the auditorium and apparently saw the spectre of her father,
dressed in a frock coat and a top hat.

In an interview with British Library researchers, she said: "That
finished it really. People said, 'go to a hypnotist', but I knew it
was something that meant that I shouldn't go on."

She made her last stage appearance playing a journalist at the
Mermaid in Terence Frisby's The Bandwagon (1969). The Stage hailed
her as "the beginning, middle and end of all such ridiculous,
posturing, false, grinning sob sisters".

In a more serious vein, she played Margaret Beaufort, the Countess of
Richmond and Derby, in BBC2's The Shadow of the Tower (1972), 13
plays set in the reign of Henry VIII.

Marigold Sharman, who was born in Twickenham on March 16, 1933, died
in Denville Hall, the home for retired actors, on May 23, aged 79.
Mark Kingston predeceased her by seven months.