Roberta Taylor obituary | Television

When she was provided the function of the matriarchal Irene Raymond in EastEnders, Roberta Taylor instructed the producers that she didn’t thoughts what the character was like so long as she didn’t should put on a cardigan.

Having barged her method by way of three years (1997-2000) of melodramatic plot strains – Irene was an ex-wife and estranged mom with a toyboy lover, a grocery retailer and a penchant for brand new age fads (together with feng shui and aromatherapy) – she promptly jumped the nice ship BBC for one more hard-hitting function in ITV’s The Invoice (2002-08), because the hard-drinking, no-nonsense Inspector Gina Gold.

Taylor, who has died aged 76, buttressed these powerfully occupied roles with a distinguished theatrical profession, honing her craft and her distinctive mix of glamour and vulgarity over a protracted interval of affiliation – 1976 to 1995 – with the Residents theatre, Glasgow, and with seasons on the Royal Shakespeare Firm, the Royal Trade in Manchester, the Birmingham Rep and within the West Finish.

Her final main TV sequence was the cosy non-public investigators comedy Shakespeare & Hathaway (2018-22), with Jo Joyner as Luella Shakespeare and Mark Benton as a Colombo-style shambolic Frank Hathaway, and Taylor because the extravagantly attired and husky-voiced theatrical costumier, Gloria Fonteyn.

The sequence was shot largely in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Taylor managed to wring real pathos in her solemn dedication of a useless canine’s ashes to the River Avon simply beneath the stalls bar terrace of the Royal Shakespeare theatre.

Taylor’s last stage present was Jonathan Harvey’s jukebox musical Dusty (2018), which closed after a brief tour regardless of a promising dramatic premise and powerful performances by Katherine Kingsley as Dusty Springfield and Taylor as her undermining mom (“sly and refined” mentioned Susannah Clapp within the Observer).

By now, verging on the standing of a family identify, viewers and theatregoers have been aware of Taylor’s model of cutting-edge, emotional reality, heat and expressive voice and people giant and liquid brown eyes, set in a good-looking, square-jawed face. She demonstrated triumphantly how a extremely good actor can embody grand tragedy, excessive comedy and superior cleaning soap opera with out pressure.

And she or he had the bonus of being an genuine Cockney whose work on stage, as a lot as in her high-profile tv profession, was rooted within the household life and characters she described so vividly in her well-written memoir, Too Many Moms (2005).

Roberta, commonly known as “Robbie”, was born in Plaistow, east London, to Winifred Roberts, a clippy on the previous trolley buses, and one other bus conductor, Robert Archer, who was married elsewhere and didn’t stick round. She grew up in a small home on the Isle of Canines together with her mom, an overruling granny and a number of other aunties.

However these girls in her life, she all the time maintained, made her the girl she was. She attended the close by church main faculty, St Luke’s, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert secondary faculty, leaving with out {qualifications} to take a sequence of secretarial jobs. Whereas coaching to be a dental nurse, she took drama lessons at Toynbee Corridor in Whitechapel.

By now she was married (in 1966) to Victor Taylor, a ropemaker, with whom she had a son, Elliott, born in the identical yr. An aged good friend within the Portobello market suggested her that she ought to check out at a drama faculty. She did so, efficiently, on the Central faculty, in 1973, on the identical day that Peter Guinness, one other would-be actor, and her future life associate and second husband, auditioned.

Taylor had set her coronary heart on working on the Residents, then establishing itself, below the directorial triumvirate of Giles Havergal, designer Philip Prowse and translator/dramaturg Robert David MacDonald, as probably the most thrilling and internationally minded theatre firm in Britain.

She joined on graduating in 1976, first showing that yr in a repertoire of The Seven Lethal Sins by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (their final collaboration) and a wonderful model of Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade, the primary ever in English.

Different memorable performances included La Duchesse de Guermantes in A Waste of Time (1981), a rare four-hour compression of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Issues Previous; and majestic excessive comedy performances in Noël Coward’s Non-public Lives (1984), by which Taylor was outrageously humorous as Amanda, with a refined sense of vulgarity, slightly as I think about Gertrude Lawrence to have been within the authentic manufacturing, and in Oscar Wilde’s An Very best Husband (1986).There a hilarious Taylor, because the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley who finds an incriminating bracelet caught on her wrist, uttered a four-letter expletive and, on making an attempt to stuff a letter down her costume, revealed her bare breasts.

In 1990, she performed within the Residents revival of Brecht’s Mom Braveness with Glenda Jackson, additionally seen on the newly renovated (now defunct) Mermaid theatre in Puddle Dock, London. As Yvette, Taylor complemented Jackson’s great lead efficiency, whoring among the many army in purple platform-sole, lace-up boots.

A lot later, in 2014, she returned to the Residents in Dominic Hill’s revival of Hamlet, taking part in Gertrude to Guinness’s Claudius. One evening, when an offended Claudius exited stage left with a command to observe him, she unexpectedly turned on her heel and exited stage proper, profitable an enormous snort and redefining the wedge of disaffection driving down into their onstage relationship.

Her movies have been few and much between, however they included notable vignettes in Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1990), starring Anjelica Huston and Mai Zetterling; and Brian Gilbert’s Tom and Viv (1994).

A devoted smoker, Taylor suffered from emphysema, and a fall two months in the past agitated her underlying in poor health well being with pneumonia, an an infection she couldn’t overcome. She divorced her first husband in 1975 and arrange dwelling in Pimlico, central London, after which Vauxhall, with Guinness, 20 years in the past. They married in 1996.

He survives her, as does Elliott, a granddaughter, Ellis, and two stepbrothers, Invoice and Lionel.

Roberta Alexandra Mary Taylor, actor, born 26 February 1948; died 6 July 2024