Billie Whitelaw was an actress and muse of the surrealist playwright Samuel Beckett who terrified as the hellish nanny in 'The Omen'
Billie Whitelaw, who has died aged 82, was one of the most intelligent and versatile actresses of her generation. She came to prominence in the post-war fashion for social realism, though she made her name in the surrealistic drama of Samuel Beckett, for whom she was the “perfect actress”. The role that propelled her to worldwide fame, however, was that of Mrs Baylock, the sinister nanny and protectress of the devil-child Damien in the blockbuster horror film The Omen (1976).
If she never reached the front rank of British cinema, her forthright personality and north country vitality made their mark alongside Albert Finney in such films as Charlie Bubbles and Gumshoe. In the 1950s and 1960s her face became fondly familiar in television drama – she was named actress of the year in 1961 and 1972.
On the stage, her acting achieved lasting status in the works of Beckett. The playwright was so deeply affected by her voice as the Second Woman in Play (Old Vic, 1964) that he resolved to write a piece for her: the 17-minute monologue Not I (Royal Court, 1973 and 1975).
When she had played that twice to immense acclaim he wrote another, Footfalls. Thus she came to be considered as the leading exponent of Beckett’s “minimalist” dramas; and under his supervision went on to play Winnie, the woman buried in sand, in Happy Days (Royal Court, 1979) and was appointed in 1993 Annenberg/Beckett Fellow at Reading University.
Not I was probably Billie Whitelaw’s most celebrated performance, because on an otherwise blacked-out stage only her mouth was visible. She compared the acting experience to “falling backwards into hell”.
When she first saw the script – the fragmented, breathless, babbling discourse of a crazed old Irish crone recalling her life and assorted experiences in the silent presence of a shadowy, cowled, father-confessor figure – the actress told the author: “You’ve finally done it. You’ve written the unlearnable and you’ve written the unplayable.” Later she asked Beckett whether the character – known as Mouth in the cast list – was meant to be dead or alive. He replied: “Let’s just say you’re not quite there.”
An intellectually unpretentious Yorkshirewoman who prided herself on plainness of speech, Billie Whitelaw confessed herself “very embarrassed” whenever she read in print that Samuel Beckett claimed to have had her voice in mind while writing this or that passage. His death, in 1989, affected her so acutely that she referred to it as “an amputation”. Though she would never perform his plays again, she kept his memory alive with a series of one-woman lecture tours to various American colleges – even if the stage fright that had often threatened to cripple her acting career never left her.
“I’ve never really felt like a proper actress,” she once told an interviewer. “I still feel like that six-year-old girl who was frightened when the bombs were raining down out of the sky in Coventry.” She was always happiest at her cottage in Suffolk, chosen specifically for its remoteness from London life.
WIth Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn in The Omen
Billie Honor Whitelaw was born in Coventry on June 6 1932 and educated at Thornton Grammar School, Bradford, after her family moved north to escape the German bombs. Her father, Perceval, died of lung cancer when she was 10 and Billie’s mother, Frances, encouraged the diffident child to join a drama group as a way of building her confidence and alleviating a nervous stutter.
After a stint as an assistant stage manager in repertory, where she hoped that one day she might become “a song and dance person”, she made her first acting appearance in Pink String and Sealing Wax (Prince’s, Bradford, 1950) and her London debut as Victoire in Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso (Winter Garden, 1954), repeating the role at Oxford Playhouse two seasons later.
With Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, Billie came to critical attention as Mag Keenan, the Roman Catholic heroine of Alun Owen’s north country working-class comedy Progress to the Park, which transferred to the West End (Saville, 1961). After heading the Keith Waterhouse-Willis Hall revue England Our England (Princess Theatre, now Shaftesbury), she played Sara in Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, which toured to the Venice and Dublin theatre festivals in 1962.
Joining Laurence Olivier’s newly established National Theatre Company at the Old Vic in 1963, she acted the Second Woman in Beckett’s Play; Franceschina in the Jacobean drama The Dutch Courtesan at the Chichester festival, where she also played Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello; and at the Old Vic in 1965 she played Maggie to Michael Redgrave’s Hobson in Hobson’s Choice.
When the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Aldwych production of David Mercer’s After Haggerty moved into the West End (Criterion, 1971), Billie Whitelaw took over the role of Claire. Two years later Beckett wrote Not I for her.
As Mouth in 'Not I'
After repeating the role of Mouth at the Royal Court two years later, she played the amiable, easy-going provincial newspaper librarian in Michael Frayn’s comedy Alphabetical Order (Hampstead and Mayfair) before interpreting another of Beckett’s anguished characters, May, again written for her, in Footfalls (Royal Court, 1976), spectrally communing with the ghost of her mother. Following a spell as the gin-soaked Moll in Simon Gray’s Molly (Comedy), a reworking of the Alma Rattenbury murder case of the 1930s, she returned to the Royal Court in 1979 as Winnie in a revival of Beckett’s Happy Days, with her waist – and, in the second half, her whole body – immersed in sand.
In John Barton’s adaptation for the RSC of The Greeks (Aldwych, 1980), Whitelaw played Andromache, Athena and the Chorus Woman; then it was back to Beckett in two short plays, Rockaby and Enough at the National Theatre (Cottesloe, 1982). The following year she was acclaimed for her role in Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood (Olivier, 1983).
Away from the theatre, she was best remembered for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate feature film Frenzy (1972), and for her chilling performance in The Omen as Mrs Baylock, described by one critic as “hell’s version of Nurse Ratched”. The latter role won her an Evening Standard Award for Best Actress.
She brought the same sense of looming menace to the criminal matriarch Violet, serving biscuits and tea to violent gang members in Peter Medak’s acclaimed film The Krays.
With twins Gary and Martin Kemp in 'The Krays'
Though rarely out of work, Billie Whitelaw was generally better served on the smaller screen than by cinema, beginning as Martha the maid in an adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden in 1952 and continuing in numerous mini-series and made-for-television films into the 21st century.
Her various performances in The Sextet (1972), an anthology of eight plays run across two months on the BBC and co-starring Denis Waterman, were recognised with a Bafta award for Best Actress. She was Josephine to Ian Holm’s Napoleon in Napoleon and Love (1974), and collaborated with her husband, the screenwriter Robert Muller, on the horror series Supernatural (1977), as the beautiful and enigmatic Countess Ilona.
In 2007 she made a late reappearance in cinemas with a gloriously eccentric performance as Joyce Cooper, the hotel owner with a dark double life (and a submachine gun) in Simon Pegg’s police drama spoof Hot Fuzz.
Yet the bulk of Billie Whitelaw’s time in later years was spent with family and in charitable endeavours. In spare moments she would tend her garden in Suffolk, often digging with her bare hands. “I’m not really interested in acting any more”, she confessed. “I always thought it was a bit of a flibbertigibbety occupation.”
She was appointed CBE in 1991.
Billie Whitelaw married, first, the actor Peter Vaughan; the marriage was dissolved in 1966, and she married, secondly, Robert Muller, who died in 1998; their son survives her.
Billie Whitelaw, born June 6 1932, died December 21 201
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