In 2010, Kevin Youthful started an article within the Guardian with the phrases: “Recognise the faces however can’t place the names?” Among the many record of Britain’s prime 10 nice unsung tv character actors that adopted was Georgina Hale. “This slinky, adenoidal, estuarine glamour-puss oozed naughtiness in some fascinating movies and a few traditional tv within the 70s,” he wrote. “She has latterly cornered the market in nouveau riche languor and middle-aged decadence.”
Though most of her display screen roles had been on tv, Hale, who has died aged 80, was a favorite of the flamboyant movie director Ken Russell, who as soon as mentioned she was “an actress of such sensitivity that she will be able to make the hair rise in your arms”.
She was at her greatest for Russell in his fictionalised musical biopic Mahler (1974), portraying the spouse of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, performed by Robert Powell. “It’s Georgina Hale’s taking part in of Alma which supplies the movie most of its vitality,” noticed the Each day Mirror critic Arthur Thirkell.
Alma, Mahler’s musically bold spouse, joins him on a prepare journey by means of Austria, which is punctuated by flashbacks to key occasions in his life. This stifling of her creativity is symbolised within the opening scene, as Gustav goals of his spouse rolling round on rocks, bare and making an attempt to set herself free from the translucent cocoon that surrounds her. Later, he goals of his dying and burial, with Alma main the funeral procession, then stripping for a Nazi lover.
Hale’s efficiency was rewarded with a Bafta movie award as most promising newcomer. She had beforehand appeared in Russell’s two 1971 photos: The Devils, because the pregnant, deserted conquest of a philandering Roman Catholic priest accused of witchcraft (performed by Oliver Reed); and The Boy Buddy, as Fay, one of many fictional firm singing and dancing alongside Twiggy within the director’s display screen model of Sandy Wilson’s stage musical pastiche.
She made uncredited cameo appearances in two extra Russell movies, Lisztomania (1975) and Valentino (1977), and performed the younger Jim Hawkins’s flirtatious bingo-calling mom in Russell’s weird tackle Treasure Island, a 1995 TV film that changed Lengthy John Silver with Lengthy Jane Silver.
In between, Hale was saved busy on tv with roles such because the assassin Ruth Ellis, the final girl to be hanged in Britain, in ITV’s collection Ladykillers (1980) and Moya Lexington, an amalgam of the pioneering aviator Amy Johnson and the actor Sarah Churchill, in Terence Rattigan’s play After the Dance (1992) for the BBC. “She’s on the drink, on the medication and she or he flies her personal aeroplane,” mentioned Hale.
She additionally discovered a brand new viewers because the witch Tabatha Bag within the later runs of the ITV kids’s collection T-Bag, starting with T-Bag and the Pearls of Knowledge (1990) and ending with Take Off With T-Bag (1992). She took over from Elizabeth Estensen, who had performed Tabatha’s sister, Tallulah Bag, because the programme’s first episode in 1985.
However Hale then noticed display screen roles start to dry up. “As soon as I reached 51, my life modified,” she mentioned in 2002. “4 years in the past, I attempted to vary my agent, and 11 turned me down. One advised me they didn’t take actresses over 45 as a result of it was too miserable to speak to them on the phone.” There was even a two-year spell spent washing dishes in a restaurant, however stage work saved her profession going.
She was born in Ilford, Essex, to Elsie (nee Fordham) and George Gap, who ran a pub. She mentioned she grew up chubby and shy, and saved altering college as her mother and father moved round completely different pubs – one thing she believed broken her schooling. “I couldn’t write, spell or learn,” she advised the Glasgow Herald in 2002. “There was an actual disgrace in it, and also you had been the dunce of the category, all the time getting whacked across the head.”
Her mom died when she was 18, adopted by her father 4 years later. On the age of 19, having by no means visited a theatre, she was given tickets to see West Aspect Story, which, she mentioned, “blew my thoughts”.
She was working in London, as a junior with a Knightsbridge hairdresser, when she noticed an actors’ workshop in Chelsea educating the Stanislavski strategy of technique performing. This led her to coach at Rada, graduating in 1965. Tweaking her skilled title to Hale, she started her profession with the Royal Shakespeare Firm in walk-on roles at each Stratford-upon-Avon and the Aldwych theatre, London (1965-66).
Her West Finish debut got here in The Seagull, by Chekhov, on the Duke of York’s theatre in 1976 as, in accordance with the Stage’s critic, “a young, considerate, charming” Nina. She then starred as Bobbi Michele, alongside Lee Montague, within the British premiere of Neil Simon’s play Final of the Pink Scorching Lovers on the Royal Alternate theatre, Manchester (1979), which transferred to the Criterion theatre in London (1979-80).
Hale was again within the West Finish – incomes an Olivier award nomination – as Josie in Nell Dunn’s play Steaming (Comedy theatre, 1981-82), set in a Turkish bathtub. Regardless that she appeared bare for Russell on movie – and was seen carrying nothing however an apron as she cooked breakfast for Roger Daltrey within the 1980 crime film McVicar – she advised the Liverpool Each day Publish: “I don’t thoughts having to take my garments off. It’s a slice of life, in any case. However I don’t actually get pleasure from it.”
Her later stage roles included Gwen in Simon Grey’s black comedy Life Help on the Aldwych theatre in 1997 and Greta Scacchi’s adoptive mom in The Guardsman, by Ferenc Molnar on the Albery, now Noel Coward, theatre, in 2000.
On tv, she first made an impression as Adam Religion’s spouse, Jean Chicken, in Budgie (1971-72), and appeared in drama, comedy and soaps. Within the 1972 movie Eagle in a Cage, about Napoleon’s imprisonment on St Helena, she performed the fallen emperor’s good friend Betsy Balcombe.
Hale’s 1964 marriage to the actor John Forgeham resulted in divorce.
Georgina Hale, actor, born 4 August 1943; died 4 January 2024
