Billie Whitelaw.

Actress.

Born: June 6 1932;

Died: December 21 2014

Billie Whitelaw, who has died aged 82, was an actress whose striking physical allure was matched by a keen intelligence and an enviable range; though she had notable film and television roles, much of her best work was in theatre, where she became a pre-eminent interpreter of the work of the Nobel-prizewinning playwright Samuel Beckett.

Beckett wrote three of his most powerful and enigmatic works especially for her: Not I, in which she played a disembodied mouth; Footfalls, a one-woman piece in which Billie Whitelaw was both the main character and (in recording) the voice of her mother, and Rockaby, a meditation on impending death in which she sat in an evening gown in a rocking chair on an empty stage.

Though he had originally thought of Irene Worth for the last role, it was developed with Whitelaw, whom Beckett came to regard as "the perfect actress". The pair eventually had a mental shorthand in their working relationship, which often involved long periods of physically arduous rehearsal - her 1979 performance of Happy Days, directed by Beckett himself, involved being buried in a mound of earth. Billie Whitelaw said: "He used me as a piece of plaster he was moulding until he got just the right shape."

This partnership led Whitelaw, rather to her surprise, to be regarded as an authority on the Irishman's work, and to give lectures on their collaborations. But her roles were not confined to the avant-garde and obscurely experimental.

On stage, she was Desdemona to Laurence Olivier's Othello in the celebrated National Theatre production; on television, she played Mary, the daughter in Dixon of Dock Green, and on the big screen, she was memorably terrifying as the nanny in The Omen.

Billie Honor Whitelaw was born in Coventry on June 6 1932, the daughter of a Liverpudlian electrician and his wife. The household also contained "Uncle Len" and Billie's mother's sister, Constance. After a spell in Liverpool, the family moved to Bradford in 1941, and she attended Thornton Grammar School and the Grange Grammar School for Girls.

In 1943 she was sent to a youth group at Bradford Civic Playhouse (then under the control of JB Priestley) to correct a stutter and, at the age of 11, made her acting debut in radio. Radio gave her steady work, often playing boys' parts, through her teens, and the opportunity to meet theatre luminaries such as Joan Littlewood, who invited her to join her Stratford East company.

Since she was still 16, her parents were reluctant to let her travel south; instead, she started in rep in Leeds. In the 1950s she appeared at the Winter Garden and the Oxford Playhouse, worked with the director Peter Hall, and began to take roles in live televised plays, usually as working-class women in kitchen sink dramas.

She came to the West End in 1961 (when she was also voted TV Actress of the Year) in Progress in the Park (Saville) and the next year appeared in Waterhouse and Hall's revue England, Our England (Prince's). She was then asked to join the first National Theatre company being set up by Laurence Olivier, where she worked from 1963 to 1965, sharing a dressing room with Maggie Smith, Geraldine McEwan and Joan Plowright.

By this point Billie Whitelaw had appeared in about a dozen feature films, of which the more notable were Small Hotel (1957) and the following year's Carve Her Name With Pride. In 1961, she was cast with Peter Finch, Stanley Holloway and Donald Pleasence in No Love for Johnnie and in 1968 she won a Bafta for her role in Charlie Bubbles opposite Albert Finney, who played a successful writer returning to his working-class roots in Manchester. The pair, who had a brief affair, had a similarly successful excursion in Gumshoe (1971), while she won a second Bafta for her role as Hayley Mills's mother in Roy Boulting's suspense drama Twisted Nerve (1969).

She appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film, Frenzy, in 1972. Her later performance as the evil nanny Mrs Baylock in The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) rivalled Judith Anderson's turn as Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca for sheer menace and made her internationally known.

By this time, she had taken on many of the classic theatre roles and cemented her working relationship with Beckett. She was also frequently on television; she was TV actress of the year for a second time in 1972, and appeared in The Sextet (1972); A Tale of Two Cities and Private Schulz (both 1980); Jamaica Inn (1983); A Murder of Quality and Duel of Hearts (both 1991) and Jane Eyre (1996), amongst many others.

Among other highlights were the lead in an adaptation of PD James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982), The Secret Garden and Maurice (both 1987) and her turn as the domineering mother of the Kray twins in 1990. Her last film was the comedy Hot Fuzz, starring Simon Pegg and directed by Edgar Wright, in 2007.

Billie Whitelaw married, in 1952, the actor Peter Vaughan, but their relationship stalled and she embarked on an affair with the German-born writer and critic Robert Muller. After her divorce in 1966, they married and had a son. Billie Whitelaw appeared in several episodes of Muller's TV series Supernatural. He died in 1998.

She was appointed CBE in 1991, and received honorary doctorates from several universities, including St Andrews. In 1995 she published an autobiography Billie Whitelaw: who he? She gave her hobby as "pottering about the house", something she did in Hampstead, north London, and at her cottage in Suffolk until she moved into a nursing home earlier this year.

She is survived by her son, Matthew.

ANDREW MCKIE