When she was supplied the position of the matriarchal Irene Raymond in EastEnders, Roberta Taylor advised the producers that she didn’t thoughts what the character was like so long as she didn’t must put on a cardigan.
Having barged her manner via 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 an additional hard-hitting position 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 Change in Manchester, the Birmingham Rep and within the West Finish.
Her final main TV sequence was the cosy personal investigators comedy Shakespeare & Hathaway (201822), 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 principally in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Taylor managed to wring real pathos in her solemn dedication of a lifeless canine’s ashes to the River Avon simply beneath the stalls bar terrace of the Royal Shakespeare theatre.
Taylor’s closing 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 delicate” mentioned Susannah Clapp within the Observer).
By now, verging on the standing of a family title, viewers and theatregoers had been acquainted with Taylor’s model of cutting-edge, emotional fact, heat and expressive voice and people massive 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 he or she 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, generally called “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 Canine together with her mom, an overruling granny and a number of other aunties.
However these ladies in her life, she at all times 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 pal 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 accomplice and second husband, auditioned.
Taylor had set her coronary heart on working on the Residents, then establishing itself, beneath the directorial triumvirate of Giles Havergal, designer Philip Prowse and translator/dramaturg Robert David MacDonald, as essentially 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 unprecedented four-hour compression of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Issues Previous; and majestic excessive comedy performances in Noël Coward’s Non-public Lives (1984), during which Taylor was outrageously humorous as Amanda, with a refined sense of vulgarity, relatively as I think about Gertrude Lawrence to have been within the unique manufacturing, and in Oscar Wilde’s An Ultimate 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 pink 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 night time, when an indignant Claudius exited stage left with a command to observe him, she unexpectedly turned on her heel and exited stage proper, profitable an enormous chortle and redefining the wedge of disaffection driving down into their onstage relationship.
Her movies had 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 sick well being with pneumonia, an an infection she couldn’t overcome. She divorced her first husband in 1975 and arrange house 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, Brian and Lionel.
