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Jane Lapotaire, who has died aged 81, will always be identified with the title role in Pam Gems’s play Piaf. Opening at Stratford’s the Other Place in 1978, it moved to the West End and Broadway, winning Lapotaire an Olivier award and a Tony. With her Gallic ancestry – she was born to a French mother and raised by an English foster parent in Ipswich – Lapotaire seemed born to play Edith Piaf, but her performance transcended impersonation. What she showed us was a woman whose art was dependent on her ferocious loyalty to her working-class origins: one who self-deprecatingly dubbed herself “just a bit of slum rubbish”. Above all, with her wide-open smile, she captured Piaf’s ramshackle life, emotional generosity and invincible good nature.
It was a gift of a role and one that Lapotaire rightly relished. But its success obscured the fact that Lapotaire was that relatively rare creature: a genuinely classical actor most at home in Shakespeare, Sophocles, Ibsen or Chekhov. She did her fair share of television – indeed she came to prominence in a TV series about Marie Curie – but it was on the stage that she revealed her instinctive intelligence and vocal precision.
After learning her craft at the Bristol Old Vic, she was part of Olivier’s National Theatre company and a founding member of Frank Dunlop’s Young Vic, where she played Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, Isabella in Measure for Measure and Jocasta to Ronald Pickup’s Oedipus. But it was at Stratford in 1974 that I realised what an original actor Lapotaire was, when she appeared as Sonya in a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, directed by and starring Nicol Williamson, at the Other Place. Since the character is defined by her unrequited love for Astrov, she is often played as depressingly dowdy, but Lapotaire made her a sensible, practical girl so steeped in the rituals of domesticity that she couldn’t see a table-top without sweeping the dust off it. At the same time her adoring doe-eyes tracked every moment of Astrov’s eventual departure, making her return to the drudgery of accounting all the more heartbreaking.
It is striking how much of Lapotaire’s finest work was done in the derisory tin-hut that was the original Other Place. Fifteen years after Piaf had opened there, she returned to play Mrs Alving in an earth-shaking production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, directed by Katie Mitchell. With Simon Russell Beale as Oswald and John Carlisle as Pastor Manders, the production’s strength lay in its casting and Lapotaire was nothing short of magnificent as Mrs Alving. She gave us the character’s free thinking and advanced ideas but there was also something faintly omnivorous in her nature, so that you began to understand why Pastor Manders had backed off when she flung herself on his mercy.
Lapotaire responded particularly well to certain directors. For Peter Gill she played Shakespeare’s Viola and Rosalind, as well as Belvidera in a National Theatre production of Otway’s Venice Preserv’d co-starring Ian McKellen and Michael Pennington. I remember how she conformed to the heroic style required of the play by stretching the back of her hands across her brow to denote tearful emotion.
In 2000, Lapotaire’s career was inevitably derailed when she suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage, but she returned and worked a number of times for Gregory Doran at the RSC, where in 2013 she memorably played a silver-haired, iron-willed Duchess of Gloucester to David Tennant’s Richard II. To the last, Lapotaire was a strong presence on stage: one with the inherent majesty and clarity of outline of a swan on water.
