Actress.

Born: May 9, 1932

Died: January 30, 2015

Geraldine McEwan, who has died aged 82, faced the daunting challenge of taking on not one, but two famous characters firmly associated with other distinguished actresses.

In 1978, less than a decade after Maggie Smith had won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, McEwan offered her own interpretation of the charismatic Edinburgh teacher in Scottish Television's seven-part adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel. Hers was a slightly less flamboyant, slightly steelier incarnation and she won a Bafta for it.

Her most famous role however came late in life. She was in her seventies and still grieving following the death of her husband when she first played Agatha Christie's amateur detective Miss Marple in 2004.

This was a character who was associated with not just one famous actress, but several - Joan Hickson, who played her in a string of popular television adaptations in the 1980s and 1990s; Angela Lansbury; and of course Margaret Rutherford, who presented a dithery, matronly figure, with a large dose of comedy, on film in the 1960s.

"I needed to throw myself into something that would take up my energy and give something positive to think about," McEwan said.

"I decided to be Marple my own way, as lighter, flightier and with a twinkle because it's no challenge to copy someone and I do love a challenge."

Miss Marple's backstory now included a dead lover, whose photograph she kisses. McEwan could identify with the sense of loss as she kept pictures of her own husband, and her parents, by her bed. Controversially there was even a hint of lesbian attraction at one point.

McEwan starred in 12 Marple dramas between 2004 and 2007. They came towards the end of a long and glittering career in theatre, television and film. McEwan had been a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she was in more than a dozen plays with Laurence Olivier and she regularly visited Scotland.

She appeared in productions in Glasgow and/or Edinburgh in every decade from the 1950s through to the 1990s when she and her son Greg appeared in an Edinburgh Fringe production called Waiting for Sir Larry at the Bedlam Theatre.

While she enjoyed her greatest successes on television and on stage, she did play one of the villains, the witch Mortianna, in the Hollywood blockbuster Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves (1991), with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery.

And she was acclaimed as the Mother Superior in the Scottish writer-director Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters (2002), a drama about Ireland's Magdalene laundries. They were supposedly sanctuaries for troubled young women, some of them single mothers, but they were in reality prisons.

Her character seems cruel, beating and humiliating the women, and yet she sobs when she watches a religious Hollywood movie. McEwan said: "I didn't want to make her a two-dimensional baddie." The film was set in Dublin, but shot in Dumfries.

At times McEwan could seem prim, her features pinched, her voice shrill, but she maintained that was not really her. She had played very different roles on stage, wearing fishnet stockings and bustiers. "I love all the sort of thing," she said.

Geraldine McKeown was born in 1932 in Windsor - she would later simplify the spelling of her name. Her father was a printer's compositor and ran the local Labour Party, a seemingly hopeless task in the Conservative stronghold. He was a POW during the Second World War and McEwan and her mother were evacuated to the countryside and knitted clothes for refugees.

She won a scholarship to a local private school for girls, but was shy, lacked confidence and never really fitted in. She found refuge in poetry and drama.

In her early teens she began acting at the Theatre Royal Windsor, where she met Hugh Cruttwell, an assistant stage manager, who later became principal of RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She was 14, he was 28. Despite parental reservations they began dating. They married when she turned 21 and remained married until his death in 2002, 49 years later.

She made her West End debut at 18 and appeared occasionally on television in the 1950s and 1960s, but The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie raised her profile significantly both with the public and television producers.

Other prestigious productions followed, including The Barchester Chronicles (1982), the period comedy drama Mapp and Lucia (1985-86), with Prunella Scales, and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1990), in which she played the mother whose religious fanaticism is suffocating her daughter.

In increasing demand as she got older, McEwan revealed to one interviewer that she had started getting offered roles involving nudity, though she turned them down. She admitted she turned down roles that might have made her a bigger star, and it was widely reported that she had rejected a damehood, believing the honours should be reserved for heroes and voluntary workers.

On the big screen she appeared, fully clothed, in Kenneth Branagh's films of Henry V (1989) and Love's Labour's Lost (2000) and she is provided the voice of Miss Thripp in the Wallace and Gromit animated feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). She suffered a stroke at the end of October. She is survived by her two children.

BRIAN PENDREIGH