Jean Marsh, the striking British-born actor who was both the co-creator and a beloved award-winning star of Upstairs, Downstairs, the seminal 1970s British drama series about class in Edwardian England, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 90.
The cause was complications of dementia, film-maker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, her close friend, said.
Upstairs, Downstairs captured hearts, minds and Sunday nights viewers decades before Downton Abbey was even a gleam in Julian Fellowes’ eye.
The show, which ran from 1971-1975 in England, focused on the elegant Bellamy family and the staff of servants who kept their Belgravia town house running smoothly, according to the precise social standards of Edwardian aristocracy. Marsh chose the role of Rose, the household’s head parlour maid, a stern but good-hearted Cockney.
The show was also a critical success in the United States, where it ran from 1974-1977. By the time the show ended its American run, it had won a Peabody Award and seven Emmys. Marsh took home the 1975 Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series.
In 1989, 13 lost episodes, were screened. London critic Benedict Nightingale, writing in the Times, described the additional episodes as the equivalent of “belatedly discovering that Beethoven wrote the Eroica as well as his other eight symphonies”.
Asked by The Telegraph in 2010 why the British were still so fascinated by the past and the master-servant dynamic, Marsh gave two reasons: “Because if you rose out of your class, you knew you had done well. And we like it because the past is not as worrying as the news.”
Jean Lyndsay Torren Marsh was born on July 1st, 1934, in London. She was the younger of two daughters of Henry Marsh, a printer’s assistant and maintenance man, and the former Emmeline Bexley, who worked as a maid in her teens before becoming a bartender and eventually a dresser for the theatre.
Jean Marsh was six when the London Blitz began. At seven, she entered ballet classes and soon showed talent in acting and singing as well as dance. Rather than pursuing a traditional education, she attended theatre school, which her parents considered a practical career move.
“If you were very working class in those days, you weren’t going to think of a career in science,” Marsh explained to the Guardian in 1972. She summed up her options: “You either did a tap dance, or you worked in Woolworth’s.”
She made her screen debut at 18 in a British television movie, The Infinite Shoeblack (1952), based on Norman Macowan’s stage drama, and her feature film debut a year later as the landlady’s daughter in The Limping Man (1953), a British mystery thriller that starred Lloyd Bridges as an American war veteran.
In 1959, Marsh went to the US, primarily to be in John Gielgud’s Broadway production of Much Ado About Nothing. She played Hero, the virtuous young woman who fakes her own death for a noble reason.
That same year, she made a handful of US TV appearances, ranging from a network production of The Moon and Sixpence, with Laurence Olivier, to an episode in the first season of The Twilight Zone, in which she played an alluring brunette robot created as a companion for a prisoner (Jack Warden) on an asteroid.
In the 1960s, she stayed busy with television, stage and the occasional film. She had a small part in the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra (1963) as Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony (Richard Burton).
The idea for Upstairs, Downstairs was born, Marsh recalled in a 1992 interview, when she and fellow actor Eileen Atkins were housesitting in the south of France for a wealthy friend.
“I’d love more of this,” Marsh announced one day, poolside. “Then write down the idea,” Atkins replied, referring to a concept they’d talked about for a series contrasting the lives of a wealthy Edwardian family and their servants. Atkins’s father had also been “in service,” working as a butler.
The series made its debut in 1971.
In the early 1990s, Marsh and Atkins teamed up again on a new series, The House of Eliott. A drama about two young women aspiring to be fashion designers in 1920s London, it was a modest success. They also worked together on the 2010-12 Upstairs, Downstairs, a sequel of sorts to their original creation.
There was some consternation about the timing of Downton Abbey, a British series about an aristocratic Edwardian British family and their servants, which arrived with great fanfare around the same time (2010 in England) as the new Upstairs, Downstairs and covered much of the same ground. “It might be a coincidence,” Marsh said in an interview that was reported worldwide. “And I might be the queen of Belgium.”
Before and after the original Upstairs, Downstairs, Marsh’s career was wide-ranging, although Broadway was little more than a blip on her path.
Her London stage appearances included The Bird of Time (1961), The Chalk Circle (1992) and The Old Country (2006).
After her Broadway debut in Much Ado, she returned in 1975 (at the height of her American television fame) to star in Habeas Corpus, a farce by Alan Bennett. Her final appearance was four years later as Tom Conti’s doctor in Whose Life Is It Anyway?, directed by Lindsay-Hogg, but she did continue to perform in regional theatre in the US.
One of her most memorable films was Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), in which she played a bespectacled secretary who finds her boss strangled and blames the wrong man. She also appeared in Willow (1988), a fantasy, as an evil sorceress, and Return to Oz (1985), as an evil princess.
Aside from Upstairs, Downstairs, she was probably best remembered on the small screen for her early appearances on Dr Who. Her final television appearance was in an episode of the British series Grantchester in 2015. Her character, a cantankerous invalid, is found dead within the story’s first 15 minutes.
Marsh married British actor Jon Pertwee in 1955, and they divorced in 1960. She also had long romantic relationships with actor Kenneth Haigh and with Lindsay-Hogg.
“I have had partners who I have thought about marrying and who have thought about marrying me,” she said in 2010. “The problem was that we never thought it at the same time.”
Marsh has no immediate survivors. Her older sister, Yvonne Marsh, died in 2017.
As for the secret of her youthful energy and her enjoyment of life well into old age, she seemed to say that being interested was the key.
“I’m enchanted by people,” she told The Daily Mail in 2013. “I look at them and think: ‘Oh, he’s bought a wonderful knobbly carrot.’ Everything I notice.” – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
