Susan Fleetwood

actress on whom many a current drama student might model a successful

career. She devoted herself to the stage, but did not shun television.

She picked her few film roles carefully. She worked with the top

companies in the country and helped establish a continuing one some 30

years ago.

Her death at a young age has not only deprived the theatre-going

public of the joys of seeing her in older roles, but also probably

denied her the widespread public recognition she deserved and which

often comes late in life.

For many people, her face will be most familiar from her work on

television, particularly in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and

particularly as policewoman Kate Phillips in Chandler & Co. Given her

classical theatre background, she was a natural for The Jewel In The

Crown and the BBC adpatation of Jane Austen's Persuasion. The same

casting turn of mind gave her roles in the films Heat and Dust and White

Mischief, but she was equally at home in The Krays or, particularly,

Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice.

But it was as a stage actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company and

the National Theatre that Fleetwood will be most fondly remembered by

colleagues and fans. Born in St Andrews in 1944, she was the daughter of

an Army family and the family moved around a great deal, including a

pre-Suez stint in Egypt (where she made her stage debut in a children's

show), and a period in Norway where her father had a Nato job and she

appeared as Joseph in a school production of the biblical story.

The itinerant lifestyle has been noted to foster restless artists and

while her brother Mick went on to form the most successful blues band of

the period, Fleetwood Mac, Susan Fleetwood was sent to a convent school

after failing her 11-plus and from there won a scholarship to the Royal

Academy of Dramatic Arts at the age of 16.

At college she met Terry Hands, who was to be her partner for nine

years and important influence on her life, and began Shakespearian

career, playing Lady Macbeth, and Rosalind in As You Like It on tour in

Tuscon and Phoenix, Arizona. Hands was Orlando. Back in Britain the pair

were part of a group who established the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool,

with a classical repertoire which would be familiar to fans of the

Citizens' in the 1980s and Fleetwood both acting and adminstrating the

company.

Three years later she and Hands went to the RSC and apart from

sojourns with the Prospect and Cambridge Theatre Companies, she remained

there for 10 years. Only a year after her arrival her interpretation of

the role of Regan in King Lear insured that everything she did

subsequently was eagerly noted. In the early seventies her performance

as Portia in The Merchant of Venice, succeeding Judy Dench, a

controversial scene where she simulated orgasm in Hands's production of

Murder in the Cathedral, and her Katherine in The Taming Of The Shrew,

opposite Alan Bates, rewarded the attention.

At the National (which she joined after Peter Hall succeeded Laurence

Olivier) she was the only English actor -- in the central role of Pegeen

Mike -- in an all-Irish production of The Playboy of the Western World.

There was Irish blood on both sides of her family, certainly, but she

repeated the solo trick as Nora in O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars a

few years later. In between she was Ophelia to Albert Finney's Hamlet, a

role she had also played memorably opposite Ian McKellen with the

Cambridge Theatre Company.

With that company she had also played Nina in the Seagull, and in the

nineties she played Arkadina in the same play at Stratford, a

performance described in The Herald as ''consummate -- beautiful,

passionate, assured, yet with an underlying, driven restlessness''. Her

performance in Much Ado About Nothing from the same season was ''a

deliciously frolicsome Beatrice, executing little kicks and leaps of

delight to express her joy in life''.

Despite her extrovert nature in theatrical company, Susan Fleetwood

remained a solitary person and she never married although her life

included several long relationships.