Actress.

Born: December 31, 1952; Died: October 13, 2014

ELIZABETH Norment, who has died aged 61, was an American Shakespearean stage actress who latterly reached a much wider audience when she took on the role of secretary to Kevin Spacey's unscrupulous, wheeler-dealer politician Frank Underwood in the recent American remake of House of Cards.

The series is notable for being one of the first big-budget drama series produced specifically for the internet.

The first series was released last year and was a hit both in its streamed form on the Internet and on DVD. It also scored with the critics and broke new ground in the Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.

Michael Dobbs's original novel, charting the rise of an unscrupulous Westminster politician, was published in 1989 and adapted as a BBC mini-series the following year, with Ian Richardson in the lead role. Internet streaming company Netflix revived it with an American setting, with Spacey as the protagonist and Norment as his loyal secretary Nancy Kaufberger.

Nancy was a regular presence on the show without ever being one of the pivotal characters, though she did take in Rachel Posner (Rachel Brosnahan), the former prostitute who develops a relationship with one of the other main characters.

House of Cards was not Norment's first political drama - she played Eunice Kennedy, sister of John, Bobby and Ted in the mini-series Robert Kennedy and His Times, in 1985.

She was born Elizabeth Larrabee Norment in Washington DC in 1952.

Her father worked in an administrative capacity for the CIA and she spent part of her childhood in Japan and Germany. She studied literature and theatre at an impressive list of universities - Chicago, Cornell and Yale - and then joined the new American Repertory Theatre company, based at Harvard. Norment also worked in theatre in New York and California. She was passionate about Shakespeare and played several of his major female characters, including Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Rosalind in As You Like It.

She also appeared occasionally in films and TV, playing a hairdresser in the film The Woman in Red as early as 1984 and taking guest roles on such shows as LA Law (1987) and ER (1995), before getting the part on House of Cards for which she will be most readily recognised. She died at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York - no further details were released. She is survived by her mother and four siblings.