Actress; Born September 18, 1929; Died July 2, 2008.
ELIZABETH Spriggs, who has died at the age of 77, was an actress who managed to be many things to many people. To TV and film viewers, she was a staple of such diverse period dramas as Shine on Harvey Moon, Middlemarch and Sense and Sensibility. To PG Wodehouse fans, she made a superb Aunt Agatha, known to Bertie Wooster and his cousins as "the nephew crusher". And to theatre lovers, she was one of many excellent actresses to emerge from the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Born Elizabeth Jean Williams and raised in Buxton, Derbyshire, she trained as an opera singer at the Royal School of Music and taught at Coventry Technical College before fulfilling her desire to act in 1953, when she was 23 years old, by joining the Bristol Old Vic.
There, and subsequently at the Birmingham Rep, she gained valuable experience that stood her in good stead when, in 1962, she joined Peter Hall's fledgling Royal Shakespeare Company and began to make her name in such notable supporting roles as Mrs Vixen in Peter Wood's convict-ship production of The Beggar's Opera (1962).
Spriggs graduated to more significant roles in the mid-1960s. Her Gertrude in Hall's Hamlet (1965) made a huge impression on theatre-goers and she revealed a gift for bawdy comedy as Mistress Quickly in Henry IV Parts I and II and as the nurse in Romeo and Juliet at Stratford in 1966.
However, it was her blistering performance as the drunken Clare in Hall' s 1969 production of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance that is often singled out as her most memorable of the 1960s. In 1970, she triumphed again in the Victorian comedy London Assurance - a success she repeated four years later on Broadway.
When Peter Hall moved to the National Theatre Spriggs became a regular there, appearing in productions ranging from the Noel Coward comedy Blithe Spirit (1976) to the Arnold Wesker drama Love Letters on Blue Paper (1978), her moving performance in which earned her a Society of West End Theatres Best Supporting Actress Award.
Spriggs's face was familiar to TV viewers from the early 1980s, when she played Nan in Shine on Harvey Moon. Her many television credits included Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeeves and Wooster, Middlemarch, Martin Chuzzlewit, Heartbeat and Midsomer Murders (she played a murder victim in the very first episode).
She appeared in few films, but made an impression as Mrs Jennings in Ang Lee's 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, alongside Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet.
She is survived by her third husband and her daughter.
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