Anne Kristen

Among those who will vouch for the fact that this is no exaggeration are many of the regular theatregoers who remember those 1960s seasons at the Citizen's Theatre, the company where Anne grew to become a formidable element. Likewise, many of the players who worked with her.

Tom Fleming, a life-long friend and colleague, has a high opinion of her worth and her importance. ``She was a marvellous company person, with a strong binding influence. Hers was indeed great acting and, as with all truly great acting, Anne's came from an extraordinary modesty.'' And he remembers how the actor Nigel Hawthorne once commented admiringly on the ``great emotional truth'' in one of her performances. Her sense of humour, too, was legendary.

Like other gifted children, Anne Biles (whose father, incidentally was Reginal Biles, a former deputy editor of The Glasgow Herald) first began to hone her histrionic talent in school plays at Laurel Bank. But it was at the Citizen's, after graduating from the College of Drama, under her stage name, Anne Kristen, she began to give evidence of exceptional theatrical talent.

Citizen's directors in those years included Callum Mill, Michael Elliot, and, of course, Iain Cuthbertson, who became Anne's husband but from whom she later separated. (It has to be said, however, that when Cuthbertson suffered a serious stroke in the early 1980s, Anne came north to look after him, straightaway sacrificing a rare opportunity to team with Tom Conti in a West End play.)

Of her performances in the Gorbals I myself recall a notably witty Beatrice against Stephen Macdonald's Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. There was also a formidable, but strangely pitiable, Lady Macbeth.

But her range as an actress was as wide as her courage was great in tackling new areas of creation. When Brecht was first seen at the Citizen's, it was Anne Kristen who played the leading roles in The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and did so with immense conviction.

Hers, too, is the image of Beatie Bryant that sticks in the memory over performances in other productions I have seen of Arnold Wesker's Roots. And although I missed her in Shaw's Saint Joan I have been told (as, indeed, existing photographs suggest) that the combined sense of serenity and assurance emanating from the character she portrayed was exceptional. In those Glasgow years, then, all the big roles were hers, among them Eliza in Pygmalion and Lady Teazle in Albert Finney's memorable production of A School for Scandal.

But by the early 1980s most of her work was seen only on television, something that, for all her skill in that medium, she never ceased to regret. Perhaps she was mistaken: it is certain that, in an Alma Cullen play for Scottish Television, she plumbed deep, as always, into the character of the woman with a drink problem and an illicit affair with a shadow cabinet minister.

And there were those riveting solo performances - one, as I remember, based on a short story written by Jessie Kesson - in which she played older women plagued by their memories.

It was in Tom Fleming's revival of The Three Estates for the 1985 Edinburgh Festival that Anne returned to the stage as Dame Verity ``with the extraordinary modesty and great humility which illumines all great acting''. Fleming is in no doubt that, with a stable central company such as a Scottish national theatre to support such talents, Anne Kristen's stage career would never have been cut short.

Appreciation by

CORDELIA OLIVER