Actress

Born: July 6, 1937;

Died: June 7, 2016.

MARY MacLeod, who has died aged 78, made history almost 50 years ago as the first actress to appear in a full-frontal nude scene in British cinemas, walking down a corridor naked in Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 classic If.…

Film-makers were continually chipping away at the censorship rules at the time. It was the Swinging Sixties, established values were being challenged and there was an influx of Continental films starring nubile young women in various states of undress.

But MacLeod was no sex kitten. She played Arthur Lowe’s rather frumpy and sexually frustrated wife in Anderson’s film, which was set in a public school where pupils stage a revolution and machine-gun staff and prefects.

MacLeod’s father came from the Isle of Lewis, which was never at the forefront of the permissive society, and MacLeod herself would develop a solid reputation for playing nurses, hospital sisters and other matronly types.

If…. was the first of three films she made with Anderson, she worked regularly with the National Theatre in London and she played the busybody Diva Plaistow in Mapp and Lucia (1985-86), the period comedy-drama series with Geraldine McEwan and Prunella Scales.

She was born Mary Katrina Anne MacLeod in the English Midlands market town of Wednesbury in 1937 and grew up in Birmingham. Her father was a coachbuilder who had moved from Scotland to England in pursuit of work. Her mother was from Paisley and MacLeod was one of four children.

Passionately interested in drama from an early age, she worked as an English and drama teacher before pursuing a full-time career in acting. She gained early stage experience with Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the late 1950s and became close friends with Nicol Williamson, the Hamilton-born actor whose own parents moved to England when he was a boy.

MacLeod kept a framed payslip from the BBC from 1960, when she received £10/10/- (£10.50) for a radio recording. After moving to London, she met Lindsay Anderson when they appeared together in a play called Miniatures in 1965. It was set in a comprehensive school, with Anderson as deputy headmaster, MacLeod as school secretary and Williamson in the lead role as one of the teachers.

If…. was her first film credit and her performance as Mrs Kemp was a source of both pride and occasional embarrassment to her family.

Lindsay Anderson wrote to the censor John Trevelyan: “Mrs Kemp, in the dormitory corridor, I am hoping will be so obviously aesthetic as to avoid any suggestion of offence. It reveals no more, after all, than any member of the public can see at the National Gallery free of charge.”

He agreed to sacrifice his scenes of male full-frontal nudity if he were allowed to retain the scene with MacLeod, and eventually he got his way.

There had already been the briefest flash of pubic hair in Blowup (1966), apparently, discernible with the use of modern freeze-frame technology. But MacLeod helped prise open the floodgates and within months Ken Russell secured the censor’s blessing for Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling nude in Women in Love (1969), with everything flying every which way.

If…. was passed with an X certificate for adult audiences, but attitudes continue to change and the film is now classified 15 on DVD, largely for the violent content and tone of the film rather than the nudity.

MacLeod was reunited with Anderson and with actor Malcolm McDowell in 1973 in O Lucky Man, in which she played several roles, including the vicar’s wife, and in 1982 in Britannia Hospital, playing a hospital sister.

She was a nurse in the original London production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus in 1973. She worked regularly with the National Theatre, playing Ursula in a 1981 production of Much Ado About Nothing.

She played yet another nurse in Brideshead Revisited (1981). She appeared in dozens of television programmes, ranging from the rather outdated race relations sitcom Love Thy Neighbour (1974), playing a doctor this time, to prestigious adaptations of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina (both 2000).

Work repeatedly brought her back to her ancestral homeland, with appearances in Taggart (1983), Venus Peter (1989), which shot on Orkney and in which she played a teacher, Doctor Finlay (1995) and The House of Mirth (2000). She appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997 in Caryl Churchill’s double bill Blue Heart in 1997, with which she toured internationally.

Her final credits included the role of Ivy Lomas, one of the victims, in the television drama Harold Shipman: Doctor Death (2002) and she voiced the nanny in the Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians 2: Patch’s London Adventure (2003).

Her career was curtailed by a stroke in 2003. She is survived by two children. Her husband predeceased her.

BRIAN PENDREIGH