Anna Raymond MasseyCBE (11 August 1937 – 3 July 2011)[2][3] was an English actress.[4] She won a BAFTA Best Actress Award for the role of Edith Hope in the 1986 TV adaptation of Anita Brookner's novel Hotel du Lac,[5] a role that one of her co-stars, Julia McKenzie, has said "could have been written for her".[6] Massey is also well-known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972) as a barmaid who becomes involved with a suspected killer. She performed over one hundred character roles in British film and television. [7]
Several of her early film roles were in mystery thrillers. She made her cinema debut in the Scotland Yard film Gideon's Day (1958) as Sally, daughter of Jack Hawkins's Detective Inspector. The director was her godfather John Ford.[10] She played a potential murder victim in Michael Powell's cult thriller Peeping Tom (1960) and appeared in Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965). In 1972 she played the role of the barmaid Babs in Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film Frenzy. In the documentary on the film's DVD release, Massey mentioned that she originally auditioned for the much smaller role of the secretary Monica, a part for which Jean Marsh was cast. She also noted that her character's nude scenes in Frenzy were performed by body doubles. She appeared alongside her brother Daniel—they played siblings—in the horror film The Vault of Horror (1973).
In 1987, Massey was awarded the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for her role in Hotel du Lac[13] after acquiring the TV rights two years earlier, only a few weeks before the novel won the Booker Prize.[6] She also appeared as Mrs D'Urberville in the 2008 BBC adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.[9]
Acting style
One of Massey's assets as an actress was her "extraordinary voice... it was so listenable".[6] Although Massey's parts were varied, her "cut-glass English accent conveyed a cold and repressed character on screen".[14] Michael Billington of The Guardian characterised her work as being informed by "stillness", such as in the National Theatre's production of Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska.[15] Massey was the principal narrator of the BBC Radio series on British history This Sceptred Isle. She also recorded several audiobooks, including Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.
She was known for a high level of preparation and effort, with one producer saying that she had a practice of using five different coloured pens on scripts to mark out "breaths and pauses" and the development of a scene; for example, "if a phrase early in a paragraph was going to be picked up again later, she would highlight those two bits in the same colour, so that it would remind her that that first phrase was referring to something later".[6]
Massey published an autobiography in 2006, Telling Some Tales, in which she revealed a difficult early life, including a distant relationship with her famous father and estrangement with her brother. She described her failed marriage (1958–1962) to actor Jeremy Brett, discussing his struggle with bipolar disorder. Brett and Massey divorced on 22 November 1962 after she claimed he left her for a man.[17][18] The couple had one son, writer and illustrator David Huggins (b. 1959).[19] At an August 1988 dinner party held at the home of their mutual friend, Joy Whitby,[8] she met Russian-born metallurgist Uri Andres, who had been based at Imperial College, London since 1975.[20] The couple were married from November 1988 until her death in 2011.[15]
Massey was quoted as saying, "Theatre eats up too much of your family life. I have a grandson and a husband and I'd rather I was able to be a granny and a wife".[21]
She died from lung cancer in Kensington, London[22] on 3 July 2011, aged 73.[5][9]
