Anna Massey

ANNA Massey, who has died aged 73 of cancer, was a veteran actress whose career spanned more than 50 years and included working with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Burton and Michael Powell.

She won numerous accolades for her work in the theatre, on film and on TV, including a Bafta for her performance as a lonely spinster in the 1986 TV adaptation of Hotel du Lac.

Massey, whose film work included roles in Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Possession with Gwyneth Paltrow and the adaptation of The Importance Of Being Earnest, was well known for her supporting roles, often playing a spurned or repressed maiden aunt.

TV period dramas included Tess Of The D’Urbervilles in 2008, Oliver Twist in 2007, and the BBC’s version of Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right in 2004. Most recently, she appeared in Poirot and Midsomer Murders in 2009. In 2006, she played Baroness Thatcher in the TV film Pinochet In Suburbia.

She was born in Sussex into showbusiness. Her brother was the late actor Daniel Massey, both her parents were actors, while her godfather was the veteran director John Ford. Her father, Canadian actor Raymond Massey (son of the wealthy owner of the Massey-Ferguson tractor company and best known in the Fifties and Sixties as Dr Gillespie in TV’s Dr Kildare), walked out on her mother, the actress Adrianne Allen, when Massey was one. He moved to America to set up home with a lawyer and Anna’s mother eventually married the lawyer’s first husband.

She was evacuated to Wales early in the war and later spent some time at her father’s house in New York but she attended private schools in London and Surrey. In 1955 she was presented at court and made an acclaimed stage debut in The Reluctant Debutante, which opened in the West End after a successful provincial tour.

The play later transferred to New York, where she danced with Senator Jack Kennedy and met Old Etonian actor Jeremy Brett, who was playing in Shakespeare on Broadway. Later they met again in London and married soon afterwards.

Her film debut came three years later in Gideon’s Day, directed by her godfather Ford, and she starred as the murderous cameraman’s girlfriend in Powell’s notorious Peeping Tom in 1960.

But her marriage to Brett soon faltered. He was a manic-depressive homosexual who eventually left her for ar man, but not before the arrival of a son, David. Thanks to a disrupted childhood the dominant figure in her upbringing had been her nanny, Gertrude Burbridge, whom she called upon to help with the raising of her son. But when she died in 1968, Massey, who suffered from severe stage fright and anorexia, was hit by a deep depression, which led her to “life-saving” psychoanalysis.

In 1962, the year of her divorce, she was directed by John Gielgud in Sheridan’s School for Scandal, in which her Lady Teazle was applauded as a performance of dignity and power. This was followed by The Right Honourable Gentleman (1964), The Glass Menagerie (1965) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1966).

As Katherine, she was heard with Richard Burton in an American recording of Henry V, and in 1965 starred with Laurence Olivier in Bunny Lake Is Missing, a film directed by Otto Preminger.

Although she made her first film aged 21 and shone in the theatre, she was better known as a television actress, appearing in such classic BBC dramas as The Pallisers (1974) as Lady Laura Standish and the 1978 adaptation of Rebecca. Despite such a prolific career, Massey once said: “I find acting incredibly difficult – it demands much more of my time than it does for some people. “I’m not instinctive. It takes enormous discipline and bravery to get me there.”

She was alone for 27 years until she met Uri Andres, a Russian metallurgist working at Imperial College, London, at a dinner party and married him three months later. Brett died in 1995 and she is survived by her second husband and by the son of her first marriage, the novelist and illustrator David Huggins.

She received a CBE for services to drama at Buckingham Palace in 2005. Her autobiography, Telling Some Tales, was published the following year.